Worms in the deeps (Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam)

Slothyyyyyyy hosts the Extremely Byzantine 5-Room Dungeon Jam and this is my ashcan entry. I am using an 'out-take' from the d24 woodworm dungeons set. https://itch.io/jam/byzantine-5-room-dungeons.

This is the lair of hiver-bugs - a parasite/predator of insectfolk (see Deep Time Monster Groups and Culture of the insectfolk - Beetlescale) - gnawed deep into the roots of mountains. Trapped within for a very long time, chaos on the surface has finally unmanned the watch-posts and seen the seals broken.

These things are the vampire analogs from a time when everything had exoskeletons and their crushing jaws are their adaption. They are tough, swift and dangerous in melee with pheremonic 'charm' equivalent, and a penchant for whole innards, not just blood. They believe themselves the last 'real' people left alive amidst these disgusting, swarming mammals. Below is a typical lair of theirs, chewed from the bowels of the earth over aeons.

1. Chasm of Echos - screams and cries of historical events reverberate from the deeps as one clambers aound it along perilous ledges
1. - calls for help, lost
2. - clash of battle
3. - screams of ambushed
4. - buzz of hivers flying
5. - tramp of marching feet
6. - crunching of chitin being crushed in the maws of hiverbugs

2. Cavern of Shadows - phosphorescent, dim light
1. - shadows, insectfolk form
2. - bats
3. - illusion-hidden pits
4. - piercers
5. - ropers
6. - uneven-floor trip-hazards onto caltrop-like spiky flooring beyond

3. Labyrinth of Illusions (d6 per dungeon turn)
1. - maze of tunnels with rushing footsteps echoing
2. - charge of insectfolk thralls from illusory corridors entrances
3. - stalking small insectfolk, fire at range and flee
4. - loops with cloaked exit
5. - incredibly obvious trap - for those who do not perceive by sight
6. - lurking insectfolk guards - just propped up shells

4. dominated hives - thrall insect folk living vampiric dominance nightmare
1. - masses and masses of enthralled insectfolk laboring
2. - body-snatcher shrieks if strangers spotted
3. - insectfolk carrying a dead fellow on a ceremonial bier - large bite hole chewed through head
4. - fungal garden growing on dead insectfolk, spore clouds mildly poisonous, soporific
5. - insectfolk paying homage at statue of another bigger, sleeker insectfolk
6. - ceremonially garbed insectfolk choosing from crowd and daubing them with paint

5. myriad of misdirection - very dark, lots of carved statuary, hunting perches, ambush hollows
1. - swoop down from hunting perch, shove off ledge into gulley and follow, grappling
2. - echo-chittering from hollow statues, allows ambush from behind
3. - ambush hollow - statue facing one way, open at the back, snatch someone into opening, block visibility while fighting them
4. - stalking grilles - sneak in close, openings allow stab, domination effect, then withdraw
5. - recently dead insectfolk, chewed open and partially drained, lying in a line in a small grotto
6. - decorated chamber, illusion of gloating hiverbug atop plinth, monologues while real ones leap from niches above door

Notes: I initially had an idea for leaning into the weird and making each room its own byzantine process but decided that just made this whole thing a blogging gag not a useable piece of kit and chose against that. The room themes would have been:
Room 1 - Zocchi dice based encounter table
Room 2 - d1000 fibonnacci sequence
Room 3 - monster of variable properties
Room 4 - variable terrain effects
Room 5 - cross reference the results of all previous rooms to get the 'final boss'
Passages between rooms would have been portals of variable destination

In Favor Of Repetition

Standing up from my last campaign my players said something that I was not sure should I feel hurt by - that my last couple of campaigns had the same feel. I thought I ran some fairly different things
- Brancalonia
- Spelljammer
- Hexcrawl25 But I wonder if they feel the same because these players have other very different GMs to compare against so the innate similarities of my DM style overwhelmed all other differences? I ran them differently enough to my own perceptions that I got three completely different things out of them but I guess I must reuse parts more than I thought...

At this point I am old and ugly enough to recognise the wisdom of not attempting to make everything unique. "Just Use Bears" is a load-bearing stone on my own personal journey to wisdom.

In the interest of being honest, there are certainly things I reuse
- the campaign world / lore - I have a small handful of players who have popped up in more than one campaign who then recognize some of the tales of the hazards below them or have run into aspects of factions in other guises faraway. This I think is the best kind of repetition, the rest just make my life easier.
- menagerie world / kaleidoscope species - at this point the utility of this 'universal socket' world for open table gaming has been proven and reproven. Variety in the d100 NPC species table that makes "Sword Coast Diversity" look like a klan rally in comparison. Want to be some odd species? No problem, noone even looks sideways at you. Talking goose? Can do.
- opportunity to think around obstacles / no-roll success for good ideas - tell me your sufficiently cunning and creative plan and I'll be happy to say you just succeed.
- one-shot framework (Splinters, Brancalonia) - Brancalonia was 'the money's been drunk, the booze is run out, your patron/landlord has a job for you' with a side order of 'I am assured the dragon is dead this time'. For Splinters it was 'hop through this portal, fetch that bit of wood we need for our ritual' - both worked well to get things rolling.

Within campaigns, but not across them I guess repetition is a motif as well
- For Spelljammer, ship deck plans came up again and again, where most other combats usually happen on some different backing, the fact that of course a fight involving your ship means you break out the same deckplan gets really noticeable after a while.
- NPCs (as per adventure threading) - within a campaign I try to reuse the cast, I have snuck in a mention or two of NPCs from one campaign to another but the differences in tone have never really made 'guest appearances' make much sense.

To return to the specific point of my blogwagon comrades, there are typically four types of dungeon - reliably abandoned and dangerous structures - in menagerie world (on the continent everything has happened on so far) drawn from great buried hazard-strata from the continental history
- ruined temples from the cult purge a few decades back - these are for unquiet spirits, undead, bloody rituals and cults. Shallowly buried threats being dug up by fanatics.
- fortified shrines of the predator queens many hundreds of years ago. There are for running into the petty gods, hideous artefacts, and determined relic hunters looking for war-winning weapons.
- bunkers and fortresses from the first dwarven empires war against the Final Star many thousands of years ago. These are sections of the Apocalypse Archive; for the spooky tense 'this is not a place of honour' crawls through a place where something terrible obviously happened, with lots and lots of grim defenses pointed toward some as yet un-found horror.
- wizard towers abandoned by their masters at all points down the timeline. Wildcards, but always hazardous because wizards.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.


It bears repeating.

Campaign Retrospective: Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25 )

Finally ran the last session for the main-line of the Hexcrawl25 campaign, so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style since there were a lot of experimental practices running under the hood in this one.

Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25), 28 Sessions (Jan 2025-May 2026)

What it was:

Actually a dual-mode campaign with persistent campaign and one-shot open tables running on the same map. 83% of sessions were the main campaign so we shall focus on that here. I will continue to use this as an easy frame for running one-shots.
- An experiment in bringing an old-school techniques to a typically '5e/Trad/one-shots' crowd.
- Pitched as a classic campaign testing a hexcrawl/west marches model where the players tell me what they want to do of a session.
- Running 5e but with old-school XP accrual - treasure recovery, monsters slain (or overcome/avoided), treasure squandered through carousing, hexes explored.
- Run when we had any three players; sometimes allowing a 'ride-along' open-table player

For completeness, the six adventures used for standalones in parallel were:
Waking of Willoughby Hall
Winters Daughter
Hole In The Oak
Home Reforged
Old Man Katan & Mushroom Band
Splinters: Land of the Dead

What worked:

Actual Play: The Hole In The Oak

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon, menace telegraphed by the corpses of adventurers, bigger than it seems with lots of secrets that can get missed even when players pry into things.

Another of the adventures I got when Attronarch sold them off - I did a capsule review of The Hole In The Oak a while back and wanted to expand on the running experience.

As per that capsule review - The Hole in the Oak is an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.

Session Report: The Hole In The Oak

Party of three - Mountain Dwarf Rogue, Halfling Fighter, Elf Ranger

At the request of the town Arcanist, some wandering adventurers set out to find the wizards lair by a big oak out in the swamp and see how dangerous it might be. After considering enlisting some henchmen and deciding they would rather not split the loot, the party hiked out past the old skyburials, out past the mudpool shrine and after some tense negotiations with a tabaxi hunter, found a mysteriously dry patch in the middle of the swamp with a great gnarled old oak growing on it.

[DM Commentary - to this point the players were hexcrawling out to the adventure site, I was still working out whether wrapping these stand-alone adventures before and after with some hexcrawling was fun or a time sink. It increases the risk of people getting distracted or side tracked but does make the world feel more real with not everything being about the one thing they are looking into. Also in the course of the evening before they set off it became apparent that the halfling was a mighty local athlete of some reknown.]

Venturing down into the hole they found by it they squeezed past some grasping vines, argued with some root faces, trading a famed discus for some answers. The root faces told them that to find the wizard they needed to go back through the roots and the other way. They ranger was unwilling to hazard the roots again and so they set out to find another way around.

They trekked on to a big cavern and thence to a mysterious carved arch with a corpse in front of it. Searching the corpse and archway found the corpse was definitely dead from a big slice and the arch had nothing obvious to it. Some wandering troglodytes struck up a shouted conversation through the archway but with neither group will to cross it, our heroes wandered off to find another route.

[DM Commentary - the wandering monster tables came into play quite interestingly here - the party was semi-stalled out in front of the arch, intimidated by the obvious trap, when some troglodytes turned up - also very much disinclined to deal with the trap. Running into a group that is not inclined to be baited into screaming and charging an obvious death-trap, where the correct answer is to tell them to sod off and go around is pretty iconic for old school dungeon crawling.]

They found a room full of mysterious sand, a spectral fight between man and giant lizard and then arrived into a big hall full of work statues with many doors. Searching there yielded little beyond trails.

The next door they tried revealed another corpse and another arch - they rummaged through the corpses pockets, found some coins and then decided to leave this arch alone too. They decided to try the door on the other side of the hall... and found another arch! A sharp eyed party member spotted the glint of eyes above it then the ferocious halfing charged into combat. Some unlucky misses by the giant spider and a critical hit from a longbow led to a resounding victory and the party pressed onwards through this arch.

Marching past a statue and some mirrors they came to a large room with a big rug - and decided to head north, away from their stated goal of the passage beyond the roots. A careless step and the rogue vanished, snatched away to the bat cavern by an unseen magic circle. The ranger and fighter press on a little, finding a locked room with some troglodytes and after a tense but informative conversation around a scarcely opened door, they too decide to step on the magic circle to follow and find their comrade.

[DM Commentary - this is one of the eternal challenges for how to handle surprise party splits - tell the player who just vanished 'I'll get to you in a minute' and make the rest of the party make suitably uninformed decisions, that at least everyone can listen to? Pull the vanished player to one side and play things out with them while the other cool their heels - the fact that time is required to deal with it being information in itself? Just continue play for the vanished player and let the mystery collapse for the rest? I did the first but pushed pretty hard for a decision from the rest to keep the vanished from getting overly bored.]

The rogue appears elsewhere - in a new part of a familiar bat-stinking cavern - and choose between three doors ahead of them. Skirting some beetles feasting on a kill they squeeze arduosly through a tight, slimy crevasse. By the time they had emerged into an cavern full of stalactites with another door they heard noises on the far side and opened it to find the ranger and fighter just appeared.

They made their way back down the bat cavern, retracing their steps past the sand, the dead spider and carefully around the rug until they entered a passage where an illusory image of the wizard sprang to life with a halting and partially complete welcome. Deciding they had fulfilled the letter of their mission by finding out about the place and being right beside the entrance, they climbed out and hiked home to be paid.

The party netted 2 gold, 14 silver each as their share of the coins found on the dead dwarf; plus payment from the Arcanist that far outstripped that.

[DM Commentary - the route the party took missed pretty much everything valuable; this was poor, hazardous pickings from their point of view. The 'pry up everything, poke in every corner' mentality of real old-school dungeoneering was absent so traps and treasures were missed as the party remained very wary of traps.]

Session Report Ends

It was a little tricky to navigate the book - because it is so Jayquaysed you have rooms connecting which are far apart in the book which drives a fair amount of flipping about. The many corpses of unlucky previous adventures kept the tension very high and inculcated a healthy respect for the traps and hazards they suspected were about. As I previously wrote "The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display."

This venture was a scouting run - the players declared they had enough to get paid and bailed leaving extensive blocks of the dungeon untouched and without real clues to what might be there beyond a sense the place was definitely bigger. I am not sure the players were even left convinced there was anything worth going back down there for - they missed clues to treasures - and it would pretty much need new rumours to get them to go back.

Overall great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim and densely packed with lots of directly adventurable content. There was way more thaan I used for this four-hour slot, probably another two similar sessions could be wrung from this, lots of adventuring.

Fear not the big booms

tl;dr: no need to be afraid of early-modern fire-arms in your campaign

longstanding question about guns in D&D - my experiences no need to worry too much. I have had gunpowder crop up in two campaigns so far - Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis and Hexcrawl25 Realm of the Reluctant King - and in neither did it wreck the campaign.

First and most simply - one of the party was a musket armed Giff in the Spelljammer game and they played the part of a sniper par excellence - but no moreso than the long-bow wielding elf I adventured alongside in Out of the Abyss. Campaign took place in wildspace/on planets and in any case I was playing the campaign as written so no phlogiston nor the ignition risk of gunpowder associated with that. All in all, it was wholly a flavour thing beyond one trap made out of gunpowder barrels.

The players even made fairly large scale anti-shipping contraptions they launched with some spiky trap things included but never tried to acquire or incorporate gunpowder for whatever reasons.

In the second campaign - the Hexcrawl25 game - gunpowder had a lot more of a place but still did not break the game or ruin the flavour. It was introduced somewhat as an accident because I had resolved to try and use as much of Knock#1 as possible in that campaign and so when they searched the back rooms of a tavern unexpectedly I decided the '20 Gunpowders' table could be fun and it went from there.

The first thing they found was a heap of 'dragonpowder' - magical thermite essentially that "a wizard left there" which they stuffed into a bag and scarpered with. Afterwards I used a usage dice system to track depletion for their rather random use of it. It came in very handy for venturing through an insectfolk labyrinth where they used it to burn open some vaults.

With the knowledge that in-world there were such things, they took themselves to a goblin-market and traded various battlefield lootings for some more explosive powders - a handful of vials of saintsbone and a pouch of organic goblins-own gunpowder that could theoretically be self-replenishing. After this they took themselves off to commission a shotgun/blunderbus type weapon for the dwarf and after that considered themselves ready. These were a few mini-quests over a series of sessions as they were traipsing too and fro across the hexmap so I considered those things well earned.

Their final set up was for the dwarf to have the shotgun with their small squire riding on their shoulder and serving as a loader in fights. They also put a saddle-horn type mount for the gun on the top of their big lizard beast of burden so that the two small minions could operate it from beast-back while everyone else dismounted to fight on foot.

In the end, it never came into play as a game-breaking thing - it let the dwarf fighter participate in fights at range alongside the sorcerer and artificer - at about the same level of effectivenss which I could live with. Often at close quarters the noise of using the shotgun stopped it from being a 'first strike' weapon and the party as a whole leaned more on magic.

The funny thing is that these gunpowders came into play at the climax of each of the dungeons in Knock#1:
- In Citadel of Evil a batch of dragonpowder bundled to a vial of alchemists fire was catapulted into the main stairwell and set off an inferno that both torched out the top floors of the castle but also cut off the main villains line of retreat.
- In Praise the Fallen the main villain was about to teleport away on their initiative when the herbalist-themed artificer catapulted a bundle of all the saintsbone at their feet for great fistfuls of damage dice. This also threw some damage on most of the party and deafened them but it did succeed in over-killing the villain before they could flee
- In Zaratazarat's Manse when they found the mysterious monster-spawning slab they dumped most of their remaining dragonpowder onto it to burn through the slab while they fought the rest of the things around them. If I recall correctly some poor unfortunate bullywug or locathah spawned onto the table in the middle of that inferno and did not have a fun time either.

Otherwise, the dragonpowder saw the most use for burning through things and general destruction and mayhem against non-moving foes or other obstructions. Weirdly, they also decided during one significant night carousing to try inhaling dragonpowder and some more rolls on the goblin activity table established it to be a fairly effective hang-over cure.

There was two other notable uses of explosives throughout the campaign - first to cover a prison escape and second to collapse a doorway with hostiles on the far side.

The prison escape hinged off roping in some dwarven artificers who were part of the group being rescued to set up the trigger mechanisms to turn the explosives the players could supply into the time-delayed inferno they needed. I was pretty happy with this, as it was a pretty cunning plan overall relying on a pushing a rigged mine-cart onto a lift to the enemy camp above and then running like hell. The challenge for the players was not trivialised by the availability of explosives, so all to the good.

The door collapse was during the final session - while fighting thralls in "The Aboleths Dream" by Elven Tower the party had wedged the door leading into room seven while they fought other thralls. More thralls gathered from room(s) eight to bash down the door and had splintered it open Shining style when one of the party Catapults a bundle of vials of explosives wrapped around an alchemists fire. Big kaboom, bought them time to run off, and on their exit up stairs one they touched off the last of their gunpowder to shatter the entrance and let them get away.

In two separate campaigns the players never really went all-in on the potential of having access to explosives - except for the above 'big boss killer' moments. We were not seeing land-mine equivalents, doors being blown off hinges, explosives rolled into enemy strong points or similar item-focussed problem solving.

To mirror this, I did not lean heavily into explosives being in the hands of adversaries - the RAW magical ranged attacks of Astral Elves in the Light of Xaryxis campaign were sufficient for them. For the hexcrawl, the two major groups of adversaries so far have been mobs of cultists ambushed in tunnels and great beasts fought out in the open, neither of which have been made boring by the dwarf having a shotgun. The tunnel fights had a big element of sneaking about to not draw down the rest of the dungeon which kept things interesting. The big beasts were generally big enough that even a shotgun was not going to cut much mustard.

The main lesson I took from all this was that the gamebreaking potential of low-rate of fire weapons is overstated - the magical fire-power of standard classes of characters is equivalent, if not better. I cannot promise if you throw in some odd explosives for flavour, your players won't wreck your campaign but two completely different sets of players (different ages, nationalities, game formats) did not leverage them to wreck mine so maybe you'll be fine too.

Mapwork in campaigns (Maps Blogwagon)

tl;dr: get a broad coarse view of your world; there are easy tools to use & you will not regret it when your players head for the horizons.

This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.

Ducal House Example

i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.

This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.

Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.

Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up

Ducal House - Year Seven Begins

This is being written as we cruise up on the second child-related campaign hiatus - it is a good sign that the campaign has survived one so far and that interest exists to continue with it post-hiatus.

The stats are becoming quite impressive
Running March-2020 to present
149 sessions held (150 including session zero)
663 hours played
Averaging two sessions a month tempo.
Levelled up 10 times

Big things done this year was the closing down of one major threat to the world - the reemergence of the dead god of the undead - by tracking down a last extant artefact, slaying his last true believer with it and flinging the parts into the vauls of a mountain fortress. This puts paid to a plot running since session two, and the blow fell in session 138 so a mere 136 sessions to resolve it, with some detours along the way.

The big shift this past year was accelerating the in-world clock; getting more relaxed about time passing. This paid off in us getting nearly a whole month done in ~ 30 sessions roughly a session a day, twice as fast as in previous years. We all agreed to try this and it seems to be paying off.

The Sorcerer, as drawn by the Bard

As ever, XP is a flat 200 per session and then whatever comes from combat and risk-taking. There were a few big fights while questing around trying to find the artefact which pushed the total nicely but since then, apart from one ambush by rivals, there has been a lot of inteligence gathering and set up for a run on the next known hazard-to-all-life so a slower tick up of XP.

Statistics

Sessions per month varied over the year - quite a lot early in the year while bearing down on the artefact and then slower in the back half of the year - averaging the twice monthly tempo that was the initial target. I must once again recommend this sanity preserving technique for DMs - commit to a tempo that is slower than you would love, and then see if you can get a bonus session here or there. Those sessions will feel like treats as opposed to trying to keep a high tempo, having life-driven cancellations, and have the same number of sessions feel like thin gruel.

December last year was also the point where the actual hours and the theoretical plan finally crossed over. That plan - a pair of five hours sessions, ten hours of gaming, per month - was wildly ambitious for a sustained campaign but lo, we got six years in before we've fallen under that target. Admittedly, we have been burning down a massive pandemic-lock-in bank of hours played but still, we are only now falling behind where I might have hoped to be.

There was no level up this year - it was spent at 11th level throughout. They are creeping up on 12th level, one more good fight and they will probably get there. Average session length has ticked down this past year; 3.3 hrs versus 4.1 hrs the year before and 4.6 hrs for the campaign to date. We put in a fair few more evening sessions in person this last year which were good for keeping tempo up but those slots are just shorter by their nature.

As mentioned above after a wedge of combat XP while closing in on the artefact, things have been a lot lower risk of late. It needs one more significant fight - though one thing that is slowing things down a chunk is the inclusion of a fairly heavyweight high-CR follower in the party of late which has been diluting everyones combat XP gains.

As mentioned above, very happy to see the steepening of the time passing in-world; hopefully we can keep up this in-world tempo as it makes it more plausible for in-world consequences to propagate, both good and bad.

Plot progression

To recap the party's actual doings in world - things opened with a raid on an infernal ceremony, a desperate noble seeking to restore his families fortune, then progressed through repatriation of rescuees from a githyanki raid on the astral, and some setting the realm in order before they departed for a raid over the mountains into the chaotic warzone of their western neighbour, under invasion by their northern neighbout. Awakened ancient monsters, undead legions, wolf-riding hordes and local militias all clashed in the lands where a god had once died. After a side-trek to sneak into the lair of the stone giants lich-king for reconnaisance, the party scoured these war torn lands until they found the ruins of the ancient capital, snuck in, fought their way out past a swarm of demons and undead and fled with the blade of that long-dead god.

After a brief respite at the beach, the blade was used to slay that gods last true believer, then flung in the deepest, darkest vault in the family holdings. A diversion to the moon was followed by some house duties to supervise the removal of a deadly legacy from a buried temple of Bain beneath the capital, followed by an ambush by a third party in those same undercity catacombs. Finally, after tense discussions with their lieges court mage and realising they hunted the same foes, the year closed with a tour of the trouble spots, gathering the freshest of news by flexing the sorcerers teleportation capabilities.

The background goal to all this has been gearing up to put a stop to the second threat-to-all-life they are aware of, the stone-giants lich-king and whatever dread works he is up to.

Look ahead

We were to have a session tonight, before the campaign went on hiatus once more but now smallest householders enthusiasm for fresh air put paid to those plans. Last time it took us six months to get back to playing; we shall hope for similar this time around, so maybe some more sessions in August? We shall see.

Resolving the threat this lich-king poses is the main goal the players are aiming for at the moment, most likely that will carry us through to the end of the calendar year and after that there are a million loose threads lying around, up to them what they chose to prioritise but I think there is still enough meat on the bone for us to continue at least another year. For now, that is good enough, the year after I will deal with as we get to it!

What xaosseed's games look like

Following up on Grace of Choir of Fire's idea of laying out how elf-games are played at specific tables so people can see the multitudes that throng beneath the umbrella of 'D&D' or even any sub-division below that.

This is broadly the set-up I came up with, with a fair chunk of 'host/hospitality' mixed in on top. My gaming set up has always had 'home' and 'away' set ups based on how much junk I was willing to haul around. Minis, battlemats and other bits of big hardware were never my thing even when I was home because I ran free-wheeling 'do what you please' games so I was not putting up with the constraints of not having the right minis - we just did theater of the mind and tokens/meeples as needed.

Home Campaign Rig

Ducal House (home campaign) is like a coelecanth; this is me running a 'perpetual campaign' in the grand old AD&D tradition I first learned.
- system is 3.5e
- three players, only play with all three; trying for twice a month, life oft gets in the way but we tend to overbook slots and accept some attrition.
- gather at my place (also shared with one of the players (in-house testing team)).
- three standard modes - morning start (1030), afternoon start (1300) or night slot (2130) which differ in that morning start will include a break for takeout and probably a stop for someone to go to their evening shift or a party. Afternoon slot has no big break, runs to exhaustion or child pickup time. Nightslot runs to exhaustion.
- set up is players on the couch; table stacked with snacks - grapes, dates, crisps, biscuits - plus a carafe of coffee (morning/afternoon) or herbal tea (night). I have my DM screen at the end of the table, set up behind that.
- We typically get in, chat for a bit - any news since last seen; usually just a week or fortnights worth.
- Sessions launch with the bard doing a recap from their notes then I do 'time, place, immediate activities' and then the players decide what they are doing.

Hexcrawl '25 Retrospective

tl;dr: finalising my hexcrawl25 run; I enjoyed it a lot, this more structured full-year challenge suited me.

For Hexcrawl25, taking the challenge on I settled on the whole super-hex = 40-mile, hexes are 10-mile, sub-hexes 2.5 mile as my working scale. 10-mile was my restriction as that is what all my existing campaign stuff was done in. I cookie-cut a chunk out of an existing block of the world that exists from Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator and initially dropped a 40-mile grid on it.

This turned out to be *way* too large so the rest of the effort was done using just 'super-hex' A for the challenge - and indeed the campaign I ran.

I used the existing culture, religion, nation and biome maps and then zoomed down on those to generate the many sub-hexes within super-hex A.

Last Mile

Grave of a Thousand Heads (Onegeon Jam)

For the Onegeon jam in accordance with The Onegeon Manifesto by Cats Have No Lord

Guidelines for the ideal Onegeon:
Make it system neutral as much as possible
Make it small
Make it either bland or entirely unique.
Make it weird

This site is either a room in a forgotten corner of a dungeon or in a barrow in the middle of an icefield.

The Grave of a Thousand Heads

A frozen stone door, carved with dragonshead, with signs of panelling long pried away. Behind the door a large staircase descends 20' into a 180' diameter hexagonal chamber. The walls glimmer, light reflect from black marble, the floor has mounds and scattered detreitus.

To one side, a pile of frozen headless bodies, hundreds of them, battle-marked and frozen beneath a sheet of ice. Draw close and see someone tried to burn them once before.

Ahead, a cairn of skulls, the missing hundreds, topped with a sword standing to show its hilt. Behind it a tipped altar, a shattered icon.

All across the floor signs a packed camp was destroyed in fighting.

Stepping from the stairs starts the skulls clattering and chittering, pin-pricks of blue light their frozen sockets. The bodies beneath the ice begin to struggle free.

A few skeletons will work themselves free continuously while intruders remain and lurch to attack. Destroying the skulls quiets them all.

Touring the perimeter finds black marble slabs making the hexagonal room, smashed through in places to reveal an older cavern behind. The marble is carved with the tale of a great ritual, strongly featuring undead dragons. The walls behind the slabs are daubed with ancient lore. The altar oozes evil, the smashed icon that of a forgotten murder cult.

Time spent here to piece things together - a murder cult laired here, was raided and wiped out. A noble fell in the battle and was buried under the heads of his foes. The site itself was being studied by the cult but is of an older time, a previous dragon cult having built it, etching their most powerful ritual into the stones on the walls.

Paltry loot can be gleaned from the bodies of the skeletons. The sword has minor magics but is clearly an heirloom of the local ruling house. Beneath the cairn, buried with honors is a noble of that house, their body partially mummified in the cold. Armour long rusted, marred by the blows that killed them. A bright signet ring, the most significant prize here. Tens of gold to a nameless fence, hundreds returned to his family, the same for his sword.

Design notes

This is an 'activate the map' room - an information-trap where the damage just takes a long time coming. The remnants of the cult, the local nobles, dragon cultists, power-hungry arcanists - whisper a word that you were in this place and all of those will be after you.

Trade back the signet and sword to the nobles, they will reward you well. Give them any concern you are trying to unearth the murder cult and they will hunt you to the ends of the earth.

The true treasure here is information - the murder cult want to know where the last altar of their master is, any dragon cultists or arcanists would be very interested in the ritual carved on the walls. Most would be seek to kill rather than leaving someone else the chance to learn that knowledge.

Hexcrawl '25 scramble for the finish

For Hexcrawl25, taking the challenge on I settled on the whole super-hex = 40-mile, hexes are 10-mile, sub-hexes 2.5 mile as my working scale.

Where I started

Hexmap was at 77% completion vs target of 88% - however sufficient hexes to make target *have been created* just not within the bounds of the actual challenge.

My players wandered off the south east corner and threatened to wander West, North, East and South West necessitating that I put at least some effort into the broad strokes of those directions.

However, that cuts no mustard against the challenge in hand so we need to spot our gaps and fill them pronto. Check progress since mid-year here if you like.

Happily, no hex has nothing in it, all have at least the four or so sub-hexes that their core faction inhabitants account for.

[see faction hex populating technique]

Otherwise I need to
- do 'bleed over' for more of the remaining hexes but I fell into a slightly too elaborate process for doing that - making a grid, rigorously marking out the hexes I was going to work up, figuring out all the relevant neighbours and then working down those columns. This works but is a bit time consuming and maybe we are past time to just work directly onto the map.
- fill a bunch of 'holes' left even in quite old sections of the map which are just off the beaten track that I need to fill in.
- I am going to ruthless stuff 'harbinger' hexes into all the border hexes on the edge of the map, letting me squeeze some credit for the off-map work I did

Actual Play - Hexcrawl25 - The Swooping Lizard Affair

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere I ran session #20 of my hexcrawl recently and it provided a nice illustration of pure map based play over an in-game day and a bit. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

The short version; with a few days to kill until the party needs to pick up something and eager to test out a magical item that was alleged to make their draught-lizard faster, they set out to hike back up to a landmark they had seen. They sensibly navigate around hazards then spot something interesting, "Squirrel!" off the plan and end up wrestling with a wild-magic surged flying reptile mount in a session heavily driven by the wild-magic surge table.

Characters

Herb - Firbolg "Alchemist" (artificer)
Eggie - Goliath "Wizard" (wild-magic sorcerer)
Cortez - Dwarven Fighter

Plus minions
Clarabelle - tabaxi, small, servant
Fabricator Technician #207 - insectfolk, small, observer
Cedric - big lizard beast of burden

Session Recap

Actual Play: Waking of Willoughby Hall

tl;dr: lessons learned from bringing a good adventure to a bad open table.

I did a capsule review of Waking of Willoughby Hall a while back, noting I got good use out of this interesting haunted house - but while the adventure was great as an input to the session, the session itself annoyed me and I am going to try and unpack that.

I ran Willoughby Hall for one of the 'off week' sessions of my dual-mode hex-crawl. This meant I had a start point tavern, village, campaign etc. that I was dropping an open table of gamers into for a one shot. This was my first live-fire test of this but subsequent successful uses of the same model (for Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter) showed this frame for a session works.

System was 5e, since this is what the local open tables run so I doubled all the hp listed for the monsters and NPCs and otherwise used the 'HD = roll bonus' rule of thumb. Immunities and special abilities remained as written.

Session Recap

I got the usual pot pourri of races/classes.
Human Warlock (apparently a farmer)
Dhampire Illrigger (apparently a scholar)
Elf Rogue (apparently a sailor)
Yuan-ti Wizard (apparently a snake trader)
Leonin Barbarian (appears as they are)
Goblin Artificer (appears as they are)

I slotted the adventure in under a request to go investigate a commotion down near the outlying fields; there they found the flattened shrine with missing bell tower and a cowering attendant who pointed them towards the abandoned manor. They arrived to see the Bonebreaker Tom peering in the windows and shouting for his lost goose, Mildred.

The party decided to dash in past the giant to get in - I was pleasantly surprised at their biting on the hook as intended rather than fight or bamboozle the giant. One PC did decide to try and engage the giant, I warned them subtly, then told them it was death to face this monster and yet they persisted. Flexing a number of defensive tricks let them dodge-and-weave one round while Bonebreaker Tom tried to stomp them flat and everyone else got to fling themselves through various doors and windows into the Sitting Room or the Great Hall. The 'distractor' managed to dive in after them and we were inside the house.

After a brief pause to search the sitting room and find the snuffbox they regrouped in the Great Hall and headed upstairs. They eplored the western rooms - poking about the oddments in the Museum and encountering the NPC adventurers at a distance. The NPCs ducked away and the players progressed. They moved on to the gallery and ran into Bonebreaker Tom again - at this point the Death Knight woke and they ended up in a strung out fight between the Death Knight in the Museum and trying to negotiate with Bonebreaker Tom on the balcony. They defeated the Death Knight and its skeletons - meanwhile promising to fetch Mildred for Bonebreaker Tom. From here the party splintered and things got a bit slow - people headed off to different floors, interacted with different things and were poking around all over the place.

Enough seals were broken by now to shift the hall to 'Restless' and they were properly spooked. They managed to corner Mildred the Goose after a lot of running around, and 'nova-ed' their way out of fighting the taxidermied owl-bear with some ability that tosses something into the feywild. They faced down the NPCs and convinced them to try and run for it - it did not end well for the NPCs as the players tipped off Bonebreaker Tom who outpaced the NPCs and messily dealt with them.

Eventually, the Death-Knight reconstituting and coming after them got them to return Mildred the Goose to Bonebreaker Tom and then fleeing the manor, much of the ground floor left un-surveyed.

DM notes

The players came to it with the 5e assumption of all combat is survivably through their suite of abilities - and so the 'plot forcer' of Bonebreaker Tom needed a lot more pushing from me to emphasise that they could not just fight them, nor hope to stand against them.

I missed a trick with counting a seal broken every time Bonebreaker Tom flails the hall with the bell - that would have accelerated things.

The adventure gave me a good template that let me pull an enjoyable game out of the whole thing. Despite being statted and designed for OSR, it survives contact with 5e the system pretty well; if I had more motivation I might have tried to make it a 'teach the old school ways' session but I decided just to see how it would get approached by relatively frequent 5e players doing their usual thing.

As the open table filled up, the first block of sign-ups were all people who had expended my goodwill with them previously and up to the evening before I was strongly contemplating just yanking the table. Three were folk that ground my gears, one I had no problems with but only when the last two joined did I figure the nonsense was dilute enough that I was happy to run. I had tried to catch the old school vibe by pitching the game as 'think hobbit or lord of the rings' and two players rocked up with a yuan-ti abomination and a dhampire illrigger. I sat to table with very low expectations, I should have cancelled.

I run these open tables to decompress after my work week so a session like this where I leave frustrated is too costly a use of my limited free time. I am aware that others similarly do not get to play that often so TPKs have a high opportunitiy cost. On a similar vein when I get a table of players who are just going to argue with me if things are run to their expectations, it is not worth the effort of having the fight to uphold the principle of the thing - because while I am arguing with those folks, everyone else is having their session frittered away.

I took other old school adventures - Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter - to newer groups of players and to other of the 5e players they leaned into the old-school style a bit more, maybe did not poke and pry at things like real old-school OD&D folk might have but they treated hazards as hazardous. Here we had a table steeped in the 5e tradition of 'I can fight my way through anything' and it showed in splitting up, charging into threats alone which slowed things down as I had to juggle multiple people tripping things at the same time and then decide to either run through a time-consuming proper consequences version of what could happen or skip the consequences of some of it to try and keep the table as a whole rolling.

Waking of Willoughby Hall was fun to run despite all that; the lesson learned to me was trust my gut and just pull the session when I see sign-ups I know will be annoying to deal with.

Edit: as I saw the question posed elsewhere - did the players have fun? They said they did at close of the session.

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests

Inspired by @prokopetz making the point that "hospitality was a major part of a wealthy household’s basic social obligations" and "at any given time, a large household might be playing host to a bewildering assortment of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, celebrities both far-ranging and local, dignitaries, con artists, miscellaneous weirdos, and that one guy who nobody can quite place" so that "you’re missing an opportunity if you never talk about the Guests" here are some entertainingly weird guests that can be hanging around your nobles court or castle - or wizards tower, if they are hospitable, roadside inns while they are travelling or the hostelries of a city in a pinch.

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests
1. Latest playwright, needing inspiration. Slightly desperate to repeat crushing success of recent efforts.
2. Cultural tastemaker hiding from supplicants.
3. Clique of artists.
4. Poets come to attend on the host, their muse. Swing between wild revels and sighing melancholy.
5. Host leading a cultural moment of artists, writers, poets and designers. Other guests liable to be sketched, painted and rendered in prose, verse and song.
6. Illusionist, playful. Noone is clear anymore on exactly how many people are here.
7. Conjurer, practicing. Strange things appear and vanish with flashes and bangs at mysterious times.
8. Planar scholar. Has travelled far to peruse the hosts library and study the details in the background of the family paintings.
9. Visitors from beyond. Almost entirely hidden within high-collared clothes and elaborate wigs. Fascinated by everything, talks to the pot-plants, tastes the fire-irons.
10. Young noble on wandering year. Significant power and responsibility waiting at home, does not want to think about it.

Home campaign Bard plus pal during her wandering years, by The Bard

Actual Test: Murkmail Mixed Hexes Technique

Murkmail had a cool idea for hex/sub-hex encounter tables - Mixing hexcrawl encounter tables and I gave it a spin as part of Hexcrawl25.

I used it in a case where I had three influences in play - a chaos cult of shaven-headed snatchers who had been kidnapping locals and travellers, the local raccoon population and the beasts of the forest.

There was some adjustment required because the Hexcrawl25 set-up I am using is pointy side up and Murkmail uses flat side up but I was able to muscle through that and fit the cultists (yellow), raccoons (blue) and forest beasts (pink) into the format.

Splitting down the 19 sub-hexes into 7/7/5 was helpful as a concentrator - I was able to use my 'five things a faction is doing' for both the raccoons and the cult - then throw in a few points of mutual interference. After that the forest beasts and provided opportunity to showcase terrain hazards and then throw in some monsters too. I had an existing general monsters encounters list that was usually getting superseded by hex-specific encounters, this provided a good opportunity to refocus on that.

Re-written into Murkmails format

Assessing your local crystal sphere for campaign potential

tl;dr: roughing out your local crystal sphere can pay dividends in keeping campaigns consistent.

This is an extension of the 'high-mobility magic' discussion about handling your players rapid unlocking of access to huge new areas.

As part of early-days prep for my Home Campaign I rolled up the local crystal sphere, just to get a sense of what was out there and what kind of things would be visible when you looked at the stars at night. I was glad I did because a couple of odd local phenomena that would be obvious in the night sky revealed themselves. Lately the players have begun to contemplate travelling off-world after getting access to some higher level magics and so I have revisited that early prep to build it out some more.

Beetlescale Technical Band

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, and little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum" - Augustus De Morgan (Siphonaptera)

Signature of the insectfolk, bane of those who cross them, a huge beetlefolk with multiple scales of its fellows aboard.

As a group they are well habituated to acting and fighting as a team; most typically consider them a work crew with their crane-truck - they go places; everyone dismounts and climb around the space to do what they need to.

Often this might look incongruous like the huge beetle perched on a wall or ceiling acting as the anchor to a pulley while the medium ones are pulling on a rope - like the largest guy is putting in the least effort - but they know their physics and are happy to do the seemingly impossible slowly.

With a little reconfiguration of the mounting straps, the huge beetle can also get its wings out and the whole lot can fly but it is exhausting for the huge beetle and not used directly into danger if at all possible.

Rare to be found outside of beetlescale vaults in this current age unless shoring up a breach or re-excavating access ways.

What makes these guys particularly dangerous is they all have spider-climb ability to traverse any surface and hang upside down from anything that is not perfectly slick

They trundle into battle while the smaller ones pelt the foe with projectiles until the mediums dismount to fight alongside it while the smalls continue to harass the foe from atop the huge one.

A medium insectfolk can carry along two of the small ones in a similar manner - like having large cats or small child riding your shoulders; transporting is doable, fighting can get tricky.

With mediums and smalls alone, typically the smalls dismount for high surfaces to support while the medium stalls the foe. Well habituated pairs can have a single small fight from their medium - also fighting melee, typically with a lance.

Stats
Huge Beetlefolk - as Ogre, less unpleasant, can in an hour prepare themselves for flight and get a fly speed equal to their normal movement
Medium Insectfolk - as human, bandit stats for workers, thug stats for soldiers
Small Insectfolk - as kobolds, plus natural ability to Haste themselves once daily

Campaign Phase Shift

On the theme of 'how I prep' - sometimes you hit inflection points or changes to the campaign that require some unusual prep. My home campaign has been running a while, I have talked about 'shifting gears' before but there is an unusual prep condition that crops up when you *shift back* in trying to recapture an old campaign mode. This could also apply where you are trying to spin up a lore-true campaign in a setting with a lot of books; say a Baldurs Gate campaign with players who are Ed Greenwood fans and Forgotten Realms lore fiends - though that would be even worse for a DM. I touched on this in Ducal House Year 6 - DM Challenges - where the player-side solution is 'delegate' and 'domain manage' - but what is the DM to do?

The specific instance for me is that after a 'quest phase' which looks a lot like old school trad style landscape bashing, the party are back at base and once more in their urban familiar terrain of Thenya and its palace.

I was having a little trouble getting the 'urban campaign' gear back, after a whole section of the campaign that had been deliberately broader strokes, coarser grained days with faster time passing and fewer, shallower encounters with NPCs all those needed to be inverted (or consciously adapted where we decide to retain faster time passing in an urban setup).

I had been tracking the 'ongoing activities' - the actions their minions were taking care of and the few major NPCs that they would take the time to scry on a regular basis. It felt a little sparse; the palace, their base of activities, lived but the city did not.

Prep Notes

As the party bounced around the countryside, focused on their main mission, I had been doing a light touch view of actions within the city/realm, mostly the PCs own to-do list.

Each session I was doing a sweep up of
- actions they left on the boil
- factions and their agendas
- timeline evolution / consequences

The results of this can be seen in the 'timeline/consequences' section (box 7) for session 136.

Session 136 itself was an extended fight sequence as the party attempted to escape an ancient temple with while rescuing an ally, retrieving an artifact and holding off a swarm of undead pteradons and a pair of vrock. The session ended with them teleporting back to their home-base so the 'post-session consequences/next session set-up' needed to be focussed on their being back in their home city.

Episode 136 session sheet

Here I pulled forward the elements last left lying around - activities of their minions/hirelings, continuation of the threads set in motion last time they were in town - all this was fine, good information but it left the question of 'what is the rest of the city up to' unclear because the players focus prior to leaving had been on prep for the quest they just did and absolute emergencies. The faction politics and actions of other NPCs they were likely to check in on had fallen out of focus - if they had set off to visit old NPC pals I would have struggled. The gears of the city were no longer spinning in my head.

To overcome that trouble getting that mode back I had a look back 100 sessions to a previous 'full swing urban session set' for inspiration - going a few sessions forward and back to recall how the pacing had worked and what happened session on session.

Looking back to my old urban format and recalling while 'wilderness' adventures use space and distance, urban adventures use time so the days schedule (box 3) becomes important again.

In those couple of sessions there were activities happening at the palace, slower RP-heavy interactions with various NPCs, planning sessions, some palace dungeoneering and various social outings. I had rumours, notes on major NPCs opinions, rosters of who was present at the palace and social occasions for evenings.

Episode 33 session sheet

I decided no harm to re-activate or echo some of those elements that were seen in those sessions; pruning away ones that got resolved and expanding or escalating things that had been left to fester and run wild.

All this got folded into my single session prep format as a very extended 'post session notes / session consequences' work up.
- the long list of ideas
- till back over old soil
- make the NPCs spring back to life

These were collected into the 'consequences' part of the last sessions sheet (box 7) - this could have been done at any point but best if it is done relatively close to time of use so they are as fresh in mind as possible.

I was given the boon of session 137 was taken by the players for R&R, a stand-alone beach episode which bought me the time to do this prep.

Episode 137 session sheet

This set me up well for a 'report in and take stock' session 138 - this included resolving a plotline running since the start of the campaign by executing the last priest of a wicked god using their freshly-retrieved artefact. There was a run to an outlying fortress to stash said dangerous artefact, teleporting out to an outlying monastery to have dinner with a seer, teleporting back and then using the few hours before bed for some impromptu dungeoneering in the basement.

And of course - after all that set up for urban play - the players decide to visit the moon, to see if they could - but at least the base city breathes once more.

Review + Actual Play: Winters Daughter

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon with a romance-story core, solid recommend.

Attronarch was selling off some adventures and I seized the opportunity - got a bunch of the OSE classics - completely forgetting I had a copy of Winters Daughter on the way as part of my Dolmenwood order. All to the good, I will probably pass on my extra copy as a raffle prize or the like.

I thought I would run it against my Friday night open tables on the 'off weeks' of my dual mode game. This was an experiment on how old school adventures survive contact with 5e players - in short pretty darn well, would solidly recommend.

So what do you actually get in the book?

Commission for the ethical sourcing of construct souls (GLÅUGUST 2025 #5)

Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2025, challenge #5 is from a list by Archon - "Minor social movement" - we discuss below the Comission for the Ethical Sourcing of Construct Souls.

The recent arrival of 'brassbones' - also known as warforged elsewhere in the multiverse - has caused some debate among the artificers and clergy of Krarland and other parts. Before them everything was clear.

Everyone knew that a wizards staff does not have a soul, that a homonculus was just an extension of a wizards self and that familiars were just sparks of the feywild, mirrors to a wizards will.

For the longest time everyone knew that constructs like enchanted broomsticks, talking clocks and dancing chairs and the like were just clever tools, extensions of the wizards hands.

But once the constructs grew more and more versatile, and clearly were be-souled as they could ask and care about questions like 'did they have souls' then the troubling question arose of where were these souls coming from?

Were souls from the great cycle now being incarnated in metal forms - the artificers workbench standing in for the mothers womb? Or were these new souls being drawn from some source attuned to metal, wood and stone? Were these dwarves in different forms?

A quiet sense of unease spread among the temples and workshops, a sense that while the need to know the answer to the question is not yet critically necessary, something of potentially great import was being meddled with blindly. With a feeling that it might become very important to be clear on the answer suddenly and without warning, the commission for the ethical sourcing of construct souls was founded.

The commission can be a vehicle for introducing NPCs with a specialty in information-gathering or any arcanist or clergy. It could also be a vehicle for NPCs to know one another if necessary - or a reason why given NPCs are distracted.

The first 6 of the below can be placed anywhere - such as a dungeon - the Commissioners were either seeking privacy to discuss the matter or gathering information in this out of the way place.

d8 Things Commissioners Might be Encountered Doing
1. Complicated auguries - a group of otherwise perfectly respectable and upstanding clerics acting really suspiciously because they are worried the very existence of brassbones is disrupting some natural cycle with terrible consequences but they do not want to start a panic. Yet.
2. Interrogation of summoned fiends - a masterclass in dread summoning by some morally-grey conjurers supported by every forbidden tome ever confiscated by the major temples. The fiends trying to figure out why they are being asked these questions, how rich could this new vein of souls be. Conjurers trying to find excuses to use and possibly memorize tricks from these books they never get access to. Clerics trying to block both but wring useful answers from the fiends.
3. Attempted necromancy on a smashed brassbones - necromancers with a grim group of death clerics carefully studying what kinds of things raise brassbone corpses and how different they might be.
4. Comparative soul analysis - brassbones and volunteer civilians being brought on a tour of spiritually null, isolated, hallowed and desecrated places to witness and record their relative reactions.
5. Crowd sourcing ancient legends in 'old folk' communities - sages touring dwellings of the long lived - elves, giants, dragons, etc - and asking them about their ancient legends for any similar happening before.
6. A mixed group of arcanists, clerics and other interested parties attempting to collate various notes from all the above efforts into some sort of order - currently it is a mess of chalk scribbles, tacked up notes and lengths of red string with people standing within it pointing and arguing.
(Outside the dungeon)
7. An incredibly over-engineered hospital offer free treatment for any injured brassbones - hugely overstaffed, with far too many high level clerics present for the small handful of damaged brassbones. The place is festooned with divination magics.
8. Incredibly over-engineered temple to craft gods - brassbones being assembled amidst an array of divination devices, meditating acolytes and other things meant to give some indication of where the soul entered the new form from.