[Session Report 11-11/29/24] Journey to the Dungeon of Darkness

The party's traveled path

    The adventuring party consisted of 9 characters, 3 of whom were new members.  Sir Peter, Kratos, Thorfinn, Potato the Cleric, Hag the Medium, and Gobas the Canny were controlled by my cousin while the new members, Silnth of the Tangled Woods, Norrik of the Jagged Peaks, and Fern the Acolyte, were controlled by my sister.  Silnth was a particularly valuable addition to the group as she was familiar with the Tangled Woods and was able to act as a guide for most of the adventure.

A skilled archer, no doubt.

    The session started on the 15th of Midyear and the party decided to head into The Bottomless Tankard in order to get a drink and gather new information.  The adventurers heard about a dungeon located within the Tangled Woods that had been found by a group of rangers.  Some villagers claimed that the dungeon itself was a physical manifestation of evil while others seemed more focused on the supposed treasures hidden within.  This was enough to gain the interest of our heroes so they set off in search of the dungeon on the 17th.

A popular source of information, and ale!

    They traveled across the Old Bridge that led into Outlaw Forest along the Bandit Pass.  Along they found a small lake where they decided to rest and forage.  After 2 days of foraging, they continued on their journey and made their way into the Tangled Woods.  The party decided to head towards another lake located by a trail so that they could recover more rations as some of the party members were quite poor and were quickly running low on supplies.  As they were foraging, they encountered a pit viper!  Silnth drew her bow as quickly as an elf and shot an arrow into the beast.  The snake lunged towards her, hissing and bearing its venomous fangs at
her.  Silnth dodged out of the way but before the party could react, the snake fled.

A man of the wilderness.

    Another day of foraging was interrupted by a menacing pair of Tuatara lizards but luckily the party saw them first and was able to hide and remain undetected.  Somewhat tired from these encounters and being in the wilderness, the party had to rest again and witnessed 11 griffons flying overhead.  Eventually, the party encountered a band of 20 brigands and not wanting to risk a confrontation, elected to evade.  Despite the party's initial surprise, the cover of the woods and the encounter distance allowed them to slip away without being followed.  They weren't out of the woods yet though (pun not intended) and several dire wolves spotted the party but they were just as surprised as our adventurers were and decided to go their own way.

    Finally, after several encounters and multiple weeks of exploration, the party came across a stone structure hidden within the forest.  The dungeon entrance was guarded by two gargoyles atop pillars, and had two large stone doors, each decorated with a large, intimidating skull.  Above the doorway was an engraving of a phrase written in an unknown language.  Kratos took point and pressed on the door to open it, and to his surprise it opened with incredible ease.  They felt a sense of dread, like the dungeon wanted them to enter...

Entrance to the Dungeon of Darkness

[Lore] Worldbuilding Part 4: The Great Kingdom & The Great Church

     The two parts of my setting that I really want to flesh out some more are the Great Kingdom and the Great Church.  Really generic names I know, but for now they work.  The main thing I want to do is use the Great Kingdom and Church to really emphasize and develop the alliance between the humans and demi-humans.  Now that I've already established that the races are pretty friendly towards each other, I have to come up with some good reasons as to why that is.

    One idea is that the Great Kingdom is not just a single realm but it's actually made up of several minor kingdoms.  This idea seems really cool to me because originally, I had wanted to make a confederacy of some sort as opposed to a kingdom and this option is basically a combination of those two systems.  The human kingdom would be the most dominant and the rulers of the demi-human realms would swear fealty and pay taxes to the Overking.  I'm not exactly sure how many minor kingdoms I would create.  My first thought is that each race would have a kingdom but I might group some up with each other (dwarves and gnomes, for example).  I also read a blog post a while back about a campaign where all of the demi-humans were all considered to be part of "Faerie" and they were ruled by an elf prince which I think is really cool but it might be too fairytale-esque for my tastes.  Although, I have been thinking about classifying halflings as a type of elf, probably of the wood variety, and regular elves would just be high elves or something but I'm not 100% sold on the idea.  I do like that halflings get a bonus to ranged weapons though and that feels pretty elf-like imo.

Perhaps performing last rites prevents the dead from rising again.

    The other idea to lean into the Lawful alliance is to have them all share the same religion or god(s).  This is a bit different from what I've done since I typically just go with racial deities but after getting into the idea of having one god and many saints, a universal religion doesn't seem that far-fetched.  Something about dwarves, elves, and men all worshiping the same guy just felt off to me but it's slowly feeling less weird.  This is actually something I noticed in the example of play in the Basic Rules where Sister Rebecca, the cleric, performs the last rites of her church for Black Dougal upon his death but doesn't when Fredrik the Dwarf died.  I could be reading way too into this, but to me, it implies that humans and demi-humans don't follow the same religion.  It also implies that alignment isn't necessarily tied to religion since Sister Rebecca, who is Lawful, was willing to perform last rites for Black Dougal, who is most likely Neutral.  I'll be honest, part of me really wants to run with the implications of the rule books (and some modules, primarily B1) even though this particular one would go against the whole alliance aspect I'm focusing on.

Clerics from B1

    Anyways, one of the ideas I had for the Great Church (formerly the Church of Radiance) is that it is no longer only about Ohm.  Instead, what I had in mind was that the Great Church could serve as a religion of Law.  My earlier post about the Church of Radiance already plays into this idea with the demi-humans having their own patron saints but now, instead of having saints, their deities would be recognized as allies to the god(s) of humans.  I also liked this option because it would give a solid reason as to why there is an alliance between these races and why they are (potentially) part of the same kingdom.  When these races met each other and were able to speak in Lawful to each other, they realized that they were on the same side in this cosmic struggle between Law (good) and Chaos (evil).  The lack of demi-human clerics could also imply them being either godless or misinformed in their worship of their god(s).  A human cleric could've come along, done some miracles in the name of god and convinced the demi-humans to convert.

    Again, I feel like I could go either way with the monotheistic or polytheistic Great Church.  I also feel like I could just be incredibly vague and say that characters worship "the gods" and leave it at that until my players start asking questions about who they worship.  That is pretty boring though, at least for me.  Mystery is good but not knowing anything about my own world isn't really what I'm after.

    Maybe a shared religion isn't necessary to justify an alliance and them all being threatened by the forces of Chaos is enough to become fast friends.  That could work and I could just chalk up each race as being henotheistic so that they can still have their own, individual god(s) to worship but it doesn't immediately create hostility between them.  At that point though, why wouldn't the Great Church just include each Lawful deity.  Is it because the human majority doesn't see the utility in worshiping the dwarf gods?  I guess there could still be sects of monotheists but idk how common they'd be.  One benefit of going the henotheistic route is that conversations like that of Conan and Subotai would be pretty commonplace, which is cool.  The cleric could speak of their devotion to some ascetic saint while the dwarf shrugs it off, claiming that his god of gold and ale is a much better deity.

    I think part of my problem with worldbuilding these religions is that I wanted to establish an official religion for the Great Kingdom and have all the clerics be a part of it but maybe that shouldn't be the route I take.  There could still be a popular religion that would exist in all the main towns but maybe as you travel into the villages, you encounter more folksy religions that worship the "old gods" or something like that.  That could be pretty cool.  There could even be a sect of the Great Church that is much more intolerant of other deities that could try to root out these "heathens."  Maybe the priests of the Great Church teach that there is only one god and that the demi-humans have been deceived by the demons of Chaos.  The demi-humans themselves would be Lawful, due to being created by the one true god but they are currently separated from the truth due to these evil beings tricking them.  In my previous post on religion I said that Ohm was simply the most powerful god, so that could be another source of tension if I don't go the monotheistic route.

    Also, I've changed my mind on the saving throw bonuses I wanted the saints to give out.  While kind of a neat gimmick, I think it would be better to just have the gods and saints not really do anything for the characters, besides the occasional vison/dream or punishment.  In the most extreme and dire of circumstances, the god or saint might come down to help but that would be a one of a kind event.  Holy relics and artifacts, on the other hand, would give bonuses and various abilities to whoever found them.

    I'm gonna end the post here.  This ended up being mostly a brainstorming session so I'll have to think it over some more but I just wanted to get my thoughts out there.  I'd be interested in hearing how anyone who's reading this has handled gods in their game.

[Lore] Worldbuilding Part 3: Generic Fantasy & One Shots

    Lately, I've been thinking about the lore of my campaign setting and how it's already started to change from how I had initially planned.  The main reason for this is that my current campaign began out of playing one-shots that I only placed in the World of Dragonwrath after a handful of sessions already occurred.  This isn't a huge problem or anything but it has made me rethink a lot of the things I previously established.

    The main difference between session lore and what I had typed up on my pc is that the various good races (humans and demi-humans) are much friendlier than I had initially wanted them to be.  There's been some changes on how I view the gods and alignment as well.  Originally, what I was going to do was restrict players from playing demi-humans until they had met one so that they'd have a general feel for what they were like and I wouldn't have to give them a handout on racial descriptions (I tried that before and nobody seemed to read it).  

    The problem is that I still wanted to run games while I was developing this campaign setting so I chose to run one-shots.  However, these one-shots naturally grew into a campaign because the same cast of characters would return for different adventures.  Eventually, I placed the characters in the World of Dragonwrath since I wanted the players to be able to visit the town, explore the wilderness, etc instead of just starting at the dungeon but by that time the World of Dragonwrath had become something else. Essentially, I retconned the lore that I had typed up on my pc.

    So now my campaign setting has become much more generic since I've just been using the B/X rulebooks to run my game and haven't established many details about the world.  Right now, the campaign scope is incredibly local and only 2 settlements have actually been visited, those being the town of Dragonwrath and the village of Badwater.  Outside of this, the players have been kept in the dark regarding a majority of the lore other than what is implied by the rulebooks (elves like to frolick in woods, for example).  This actually helps me quite a bit though since even though my setting has technically changed for me, to them they will have only known this version of Dragonwrath. 

    Another reason why I haven't had to establish a lot of my own lore during sessions because so far, the party has pretty much just been concerned with survival (and treasure) and when your primary objective is survival, you aren't always the most interested in the specifics of your religion or why humans get along with elves.  All you're trying to do is to make sure you don't end up like one of the various corpses you find throughout the dungeon.

    One more thing is that I've actually really enjoyed leaning into the generic side of fantasy.  I read a blog post a while back about the implied setting of OD&D and I can definitely understand what they're talking about since I'm basically playing through the implied setting of B/X (although maybe not, since the Expert Rules do include a wilderness map that I'm not using but you get my point).  I think the main benefit of it is how easy it is to just start playing.  Before when I tried to run campaigns, I'd get caught up in trying to explain different things so that my players' characters weren't complete blank slates upon character creation and would understand parts of how the world worked.  This way has been much more successful for me though and it's a lot of fun developing the setting both through and alongside play during sessions.  

    Plus, if I don't know all the details about the world it means my players definitely don't and so there's a bit more mystery to the world which I really like.  Something I feel like a lot of really cool media ends up getting ruined by, is the lack of mystery.  Eventually everything gets explained and there's nothing left to wonder about.  Now, I don't want to have the setting be completely vague but I'm definitely learning to worldbuild in a different way than I normally have.  Another thing I should point out is that my players and I are still pretty new to D&D so the generic or implied fantasy setting we're playing in is probably more fun for us than it would be for rpg veterans.

    In the next blog post I'm gonna talk about some of the new ideas I have about the setting that I think fit a bit better with the way I've run the game so far.