Defiance Of Darkness Campaign Journal I

July 27, 2025

DEFIANCE OF DARKNESS SESSION 1
7/12/25 @ Mythic Games Santa Cruz

Our Heroes:
Sylvia, Half-Elf Female CLR-1 / RNG-1 (Brandon)
Kale, Human Male MNK-1 (Brandon)
Tykary, Elf Female FTR-1 / MU-1 (Kristy)
Phoenix, Elf Female FTR-1 (Kristy)

The Empire of Venexmar, long in decline, has resurged under a new Emperor (may he remain sane longer than the others). Venexmar reclaims old territory and refamiliarizes old neighbors to their antique obligations. The specter of war looms. After a string of easy Venexmart victories the weakest of them knuckle under. The splash of blood shall extinguish the flames.

The adventuring party are among the heroic-types that emerged from a local clutch of independent villages and towns on the outskirts of the old Venexmart Empire which collaborate as The Precious Order. The Council of Burghers elected a wartime Burgher-King with extraordinary powers who shall surely rule altruistically, wisely shepherd The Precious Order through these uncertain times, and cede authority with grace when peace returns.

Among the initial proclamations of the Burgher-King is that any adventurers with might and magic should enroll in the military Partisans under the direction of the Burgher-King. Bad pay, hazardous duty, and strict oversight make this a bad option for freewheeling heroes. Horse prices skyrocket as adventurers flee the area.

The loosely-connected diaspora of low-level acquaintances heads generally east, inland, away from Venexmar. One small band of such friends, as yet unnamed, travels a well-built Venexmart merchant road of ancient worn cobblestones, through heavily-forested hills. Near dusk they spot a ruin off the road to the left. The nightly rains begin to darken great swaths of the horizon.

“That’s it”, Sylvia points her bow. A smudge on an inherited map, full of possibilities, now made starkly real against the sunset’s glow.

They approach and find the shell of a sprawling compound of stone walls, now roofless and crumbling. In the middle, a rude shack, barnlike in dimensions. Smoke rises from its chimney. The once-sturdy but now rotted and rundown wooden building squats among the stone ruins. Signs outside are badly painted: GO AWAY, NO TREASURE, NEED WINE. Kale cracks the door. Inside a filthy drunken scruffy man immediately points his ladle at them in the smoky gloom and belts out “If you got the money to pay, I’ll give you a plate of beans.” And indeed he’s simmering an iron skillet of beans and bacon on the fire.

The party decides to take up his hospitality to get out of the rain. They notice a huge hatch in the middle of the floor, which must lead to some underground area. The man introduces himself as Jeef Berky.

Jeef charges a copper coin for a plate of beans. Everyone takes him up on it. Their rations are running low, and Kale in particular has almost nothing to his name save his light crossbow and his half-full quiver, which he sets aside to scarf beans. Sylvia spots an old dog on a filthy rug and goes to pet it, and reads the collar-tag, which marks the dog as Karl Barx.

Jeef demands to know if they have alcohol. They, sadly, do not. Tykary asks Jeef about the ruins. He laughs, half-toothless, and says he’s supposed to keep people out of the dungeon. He was posted here by adventurers who went into the dungeon and never came back out. Jeef says he’ll let you in for a gold piece each per entry. He pats his jingling pocket.

The four glance at each other, certain they could roll him. But they agree to pay. Three coins are forthcoming, but Kale doesn’t even have a pocket to turn out to show his poverty – only a loincloth. Sylvia pays Kale’s fee. He smiles in thanks, the bright red phoenix tattoo on his face crinkling.

Jeef Berky doesn’t open the hatch. Instead, he shoos Karl Barx off the rug and peels it up to expose a smaller hatch, which he opens, and reveals stone stairs leading down. Jeef asks them to remember the secret knock to come back up, so he knows they’re not a monster [This was the Terminator theme]. The party forms up at the top of the stairs and begins their descent into the darkness. They decide not to strike a torch so their approach will be stealthier. Phoenix and Sylvia wear heavy armor, mail for Phoenix and the Imperial-style banded armor for Sylvia, so it’s not a silent group. Kale holds Sylvia’s shoulder to guide him, for he is the only one who cannot see. The others’ elven eyes adapt to the darkness and they can see the subtle gradient of heat between the wet, mildewed dungeon walls and the still underground air.

The steps are slippery, and halfway down Sylvia slips. Kale, his hand already on her shoulder and his footing steady, manages to catch her; if he had failed, he would have gone down with her.

They descend into a large smooth-walled stone room, octagonal, with a high domed ceiling. From the foot of the stairs the elves can see strange alcoves starting 10′ up on the north, south, and west walls, and peering up they see one above the east wall where their stairs enter. They also see a hole in the center of the floor.

Deciding not to strike a light, they creep around the hole toward the west wall, and send Kale up to investigate the alcove. He climbs, finding easy handholds in the carved wall, and grasps a stone foot! He continues upward and finds himself in the lap of a seated statue, its arms cradling something. Upward still, and he grasps a pair of stone breasts as handholds to eventually reach a statue’s face. He calls down that there’s nothing else up here.

Kale descends the easy climb quickly to the statue’s lap, and feeling carefully realizes that the statue holds a carved stone ship in her hands. He tries to take the ship. It moves but only upward, unable to twist or slide, and it’s still attached somehow to the statue. Kale hears a KLUNK behind the west wall, and a secret panel opens in the NW wall of the octagonal room. It’s a 4′ square, starting 4′ off the ground. Phoenix peers in and reports there’s a smooth stone tunnel heading straight NW. The elves also note that the hole in the middle of the floor is the top of a spiral staircase that leads downward.

As Kale slips down the statue, Tykary mantles up into the passage. The tight space is awkward for her longsword and though an elf she needs to advance at a slight squat. She shuffles down the damp hall while the others wait in the octagon.

A helmet on the ground ahead resolves out of the gloom. She approaches to take it, and the helmet rolls over! It’s inhabited by a Hermit Slug! The slug’s eyestalks dart around and it tries to take a bite out of her shin, but is foiled by her leather armor.

Tykary stabs down at the slug but her blows are deflected by its helmet. She grasps the helmet and with her great strength manages to yank it off. The slug, unharmed by the process but still annoyed, tries to bite her again. She pities the poor creature, but her peacemaking efforts fail. Luckily, its biting efforts continue to fail. She lures it into the helmet again by tipping it to the creature, and when it slithers in, she whisks up the helmet and holds the slug’s powerful foot off the ground. It fruitlessly leans and stretches to try to grasp or bite, but Tykary is smarter than a slug, and carries her trophy onward.

The rest of the group stacks up behind Tykary as she approaches the end of the tunnel, which opens into a 20′ wide by 30′ long room. Its ceiling and floor are cracked, water and sand having spilled in from above. Four rotted wooden biers hold four wrapped skeletal bodies, their arms crossed on their chests.

The party finally strikes a torch here and checks the bodies, but decides at the last moment not to burn them because they worry about smoke filling the room. The anointed and embalmed bodies are dressed in rich but rotted yellow fabrics and rusted silver jewelry. Most of it is too far gone, but each has a nice signet ring with a unique series of dimples in a circle around a central symbol: a wagon wheel behind an anchor. In its claws one of the skeletons grasps a lead tube with cap sealed by melted lead. Another grasps a tarnished shortsword.

Tykary pokes one of the bodies. The whole thing rocks a little, bound in its wrappings, its remaining leathery skin and sinew keeping the bones together. Nothing else happens.

Phoenix, summoning advice once heard from another adventurer long ago, suggests they tear off all the skeletons’ shins. “If they rise as Undead, and they can’t walk, it’ll be easier to fight them that way.” Everyone agrees this is sound advice. Sylvia encourages Kale to go first. He plants his foot on a pelvis and rips off first one leg and then another. The skeleton does not rise to attack. Emboldened, the other three each rip off a pair of legs. Kale decides to keep his.

They take the sword and the rings, rifling through the bodies for any more loot, and while they’re wary of the tube they take it anyway – unopened.

Returning to the octagon, now with torchlight, they recognize that the other three alcoves have statues too. All four are women in varying clothes, seated on thrones, each holding some object in her lap in both hands. Learned Sylvia remembers these are sometimes seen on city gates, as they are the personifications of cardinal directions and those lands in each direction. Not deities exactly, and they have no temples or Clerics. It’s an old-fashioned practice.

The light also reveals a band of carved words in a circle around the top of the spiral stairs. They read:

A Thorn the deadly vine had
With a fearful Shout, her finger pricked
Forevermore her Seat thence kept

Tykary looks at Sylvia and says “I’ve got nothing.” Sylvia agrees. The party gets into marching order and heads down the narrow spiral stairs.

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Equipment Damage X in 6

June 10, 2025

“The dragon’s breath roars around the elf, roasting him in his armor until there’s nothing left but cremated bones … and his perfectly-intact bow, leather armor, and feathered arrows”

Wait. What the hell?

Depending on your edition and your gaming group, that’s a very normal situation. But in 1st edition D&D, you’d expect the elf who fails his saving throw vs. the dragon’s breath would have to begin rolling item saving throws for all his gear. The wood, leather, and cloth probably fries. This is part of the balance of acquisition in 1e, “easy come, easy go”, and is one way that wealth can exit the adventuring party. Players hate it. Not only when their own gear gets blown up, but also when their own blasting magic (which slays the enemy with ease) also destroys enemy gear which should become their loot after the battle is over. The DM doesn’t want to include too many blasting/crushing attacks lest his adventurers be left clambering around in a daze, naked and wielding the sharpest piece of trash available.

I came up with a house rule to make the item damage system in 1e more lenient, allow for PCs trying to get equipment repaired, for found equipment to come pre-damaged (the former owner suffering much worse), for cheap PCs to be able to buy low-quality or used equipment at a discount, and it ties in with a Shields Shall Be Splintered issue with magic shields.

Run the rules as written, until an item fails an item save. Then, it receives 1 point of damage out of 6 for every pip by which it failed its save. So, if you need a 15 to save but you rolled a 17, the item is now damaged 2 of 6.

  • Damaged armor and weapons operate at -1 to hit and damage and -1 to AC until repaired.
  • Nonmagical miscellaneous equipment that is damaged and then later put under stress (a rope being used to climb for example) must roll over its damage on d6 to work properly, else it fails. A failing rope snaps (but can be tied back together!), a failing lantern extinguishes and must be relit, a failing saddle slides off your horse. So, if your rope is damaged 4 of 6, it has a 4 in 6 chance to fail under stress.
  • Magic items must roll to see whether they operate magically during this game session, needing a roll over the damage count. If they roll equal or under the damage count, the item fritzes out and counts as nonmagical for the whole session. I’d be generous and give them their usual item save bonus as a magic item, and they detect as magical, they just don’t perform their magical functions.

You’ll normally not have a note next to your items. Only if they’re damaged! Then you’d write something like “1 of 6 dmg”. Items that reach 6 of 6 damage are destroyed.

“You dig through the wreckage of the battle and find a dull, bent shortsword. You do your best to straighten it but it needs a smith’s attention to fix properly. At least it’s better than your bruised fists. You see torchlight flickering from the intersection ahead.”

Repairs can be done in town by a craftsman, costing 10% of the item’s normal value per damage point restored. Yes, this makes magic items expensive to repair. The DM may decide that a master craftsman is needed to repair magic items, or that you need a spellcaster of a certain level (say 7th) to aid in the repairs, or they need extremely high-quality materials, and those are the reasons why it costs so much.

“The weaver wrings her arthritic hands, and behind her the silent Druid stands silhouetted in the open back door of the shop. You let your magic rope slip through your fingers, the fraying and nicks all gone. You wondered how they would find enough grasshopper legs at this time of year to fix it. The Druid, seeing your satisfaction, leaves without a word. The weaver gratefully takes the coins. It’s quite a pile, probably enough for her to fix the dilapidated roof.”

If you’re going to include item damage like this, you really might consider switching from a flat-rate upkeep cost for leveled characters of 100 GP / level / month as the 1e DMG instructs, and either make that amount lower, or just switch to itemizing expenses for when they stay in town. The money will be spent on repairs or replacements instead of generalized upkeep (and that general upkeep is hard to justify at high levels). Characters with little equipment, Monks especially, who should have low lifestyle expenses, will end up with low repair bills.

If you’re using the Shields Shall Be Splintered rule, consider how it integrates:

Shields Shall Be Splintered
When you’re hit by a normal blow, you can choose to let your shield absorb the attack and be destroyed. If the blow is from a large or magical source (a giant’s boulder, or a dragon’s breath) the attack is reduced by 1d6 damage and the shield is splintered. Magical shields are better at taking hits. Against large/magical attacks the damage blocked is 1d6 + shield magic value. And, when absorbing any blow, a magic shield is not destroyed but instead takes 1 point of equipment damage.

“You stagger back under the giant’s blows. Your trusty shield has kept you alive for the past five minutes of battle, and now when you raise it you can see his shape through the crack in the middle. A wet gasp comes where you expected another smash, and the giant hunches forward and falls, finally bleeding out from his wounds. You lean against the wall and gulp the air. You turn the shield around and see your family’s crest is battered but still visible.”

This means SSBS is not just a rule that people would only use with a nonmagical shield, because they can safely take up to 5 hits on a magic shield before it’s destroyed. It gets expensive repairing it! But notice how:

(1) a sword-and-board fighter has a nice option to use that’s defensive (so it thematically makes sense with their fighting style) while two-weapon fighters get their one extra attack with overall penalties, and the two-handed fighter gets a bigger weapon that deals more damage and has more reach.

(2) it turns a magical shield into both a passive magic item and a consumable with 5 charges – and a 6th if you need it to save your life.

CONCLUSIONS

I think the item saving throw / equipment destruction rules are valuable for a variety of reasons. I think it’s very much worthwhile to soften the blow with this item damage house rule. I think, then, a DM who wants the original item destruction effect just needs to goose up the amount of area-effect magic thrown out by the opposition – which is also great fun.

However, I can also see someone saying they don’t value the effects on their campaign enough to do the extra bookkeeping for some items that are damaged and not yet repaired. It’s definitely a tradeoff, and opinions will vary.

“The thief perched in the window. She could hear guards rushing from room to room, stabbing behind heavy curtains, slamming doors shut. The cool free air blew in, her rope tied off and dangling down to the ground a hundred feet below. But the rope was scorched by flames from the wizard’s trapped strongbox. Would it hold her weight? Would his dungeon cell be worse than striking the pavement and exploding like a sack of tomatoes? She wished she were a bird. She prayed, truly, for the first time in her life. She climbed over the sill and began to climb down.

She watched the window rush away from her as the wind struck her back and scattered her hair, the great starry sky wheeling above her. She spread her arms, and spread her fingers, and a moment before she met the earth she cried out and twisted about and flew away far over the hills and into the moonlight. And she was forevermore a creature of the wind.”

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The 1-Year Campaign Theater Part I

March 20, 2025

​I find that campaigns tend to run for a year before the seasonal break (whatever season it’s nicest to be outside in your climate). So it makes sense to scale a campaign to that timeline. Whether you actually complete it is impossible to tell; perhaps nearing the end of a campaign will encourage players to prioritize the game over fair weather.

I don’t write stories and try to estimate a 1-year progression. Instead, I write places and set up starting conditions, and how those will probably progress assuming the players don’t affect them. Because players have the freedom to wander, I prefer not to build a linear area because they could easily get off the developed path; a linear area works very well for a voyage if you include branching paths that tend to make their way back to the center at various points. Regardless, I call this large area a campaign theater (in the military sense).

THEATER SCALE
My 1-year campaign theaters are 30×30 miles of terrain on a map with 1 mile per square, on graph paper that’s 5 squares per inch. I prefer graph paper that comes with a blank border, because it looks so much cleaner, but you’ll have to look around for it. Engineers seem to use it, so you might pick up some branded for Boeing or whatever at a yard sale, but I’m sure they’re sold at stationery stores. I could use hexes, but it isn’t vital. It just helps with marking travel and making the map look more organic. Also tradition. An adventure site is too small to appear as anything but a dot on the theater map, but you can use different dot icons for different types of sites.

The map is marked across the left side with numbers, 1-30, from top down. Across the top we mark A-Z from left to right, and after Z (the 26th square across) go with AA, AB, AC, AD. This lets you write down coordinates like Excel cells.

You will build an index. Just list all your adventure sites and their coordinates. Now copy that list and to the side make a copy. Sort the left index by coordinate, the right by site name. Now you can look at your map and get coordinates and look at the index to tell you what is there, or you can look for a site name on the other index to get its theater map coordinates.

DUNGEON SCALE
Within that the dungeon / hazard zones are two-page dungeon format (map and key on left page, room details on right page) with 300’x300′ maps (30×30 10′ squares). I like this because you have everything you need without flipping pages. If it’s a simpler or smaller adventure site I’ll revert to One Page Dungeon format and make sure I put another OPD on the facing page, so every other site preserves its two-facing-pages structure. If it’s a multi-level dungeon it helps to line up the stairs down on one page with the stairs up on the next, as you flip.

A village can be on one of those dungeon-scale area maps but maybe with a scale of 50′ per square, so we’re drawing building footprints but no interiors, we get small roads and streams, and farm plots delineated. The whole village is thus up to 1500′ across (~1/4 mile) but probably a lot of rough undeveloped area around the outside. It really helps to make all your village maps the same scale as each other so you instantly get a feel for them in comparison. And you can draw the village as a roughly one-quarter square on the 30 mile theater map.

A small town with a wall will tend to have a lot of denser development inside, meaning that large population can still fit within the same scale map. The walls can be near the edge of the mapped area, with indications of roads leading away which correlate with marked roads on the 30 mile theater map. Also show the nearest edges of the nearest farms, extending out away from the town. If the players head out there and explore/interact with a family just stick with broad strokes. A fenced area, some animals and crops (enough to be self-sufficient), beehives. A walled compound with a big house, animal pens, chicken coop, a big tub in the yard for washing clothes. Watch a little footage of Kingdom Come: Deliverance for what I’m envisioning.

CITY MAPS
A larger city of thousands needs a larger map. There’s probably just one city in your theater, but even if more, it’s okay to use a different scale for them. Try to change the header at the top of the page to make it clear this is a big city, to point out the scale difference. You might use 100′ per square. At this scale you’re drawing city blocks rather than individual buildings.

Your city map needs the same coordinate system as your theater map. You might also consider putting down icons for inns, shops, and guard posts/barracks (so, just three icons) on the map to identify these locations that tend to be very important to players, and also use those icons in your index next to the buildings. In Word, you can insert an image, and I’ve been able to use an image as a custom bullet point icon, but the latter screws up on reopening the file so it’s not ideal.

Another way to depict your city is at the same village scale but with multiple sections. This can feel a little artificial, but this city-block system was used for the city of Phlan in the Pool of Radiance computer game and described in-game as being done for defense, with each section walled and with its own few entrances. Make each section 30×30 (smaller is ok but you want to take advantage of the happy medium of 5 square-per-inch graph paper), at 50′ per square, and you can draw individual buildings.

A more organic way to depict neighborhoods might be the old Lankhmar method, where the city map shows each district (and in this case tiny buildings) and then you don’t get details on anything until you reach the district map. The Tenderloin District for example would have a more zoomed-in map marking building locations and their details. The downside with this is that often the districts are separated by major streets, which means you’re flipping between two districts to describe what’s on the left side vs. right side. You could build your districts so the separation line is some back alley or side street that’s little-traveled and has no keyed buildings along it.

POPULATING THE THEATER
There’s a lot of advice online about populating a hexcrawl. Look at a typical regional map and you’ll find, when comparing the scale, that there’s a LOT of empty space. You want players to find wandering around rewarding enough to do it sometimes, but also you’ll often get them taking a different path on subsequent trips and so they end up seeing different things. Or they can get lost and end up seeing new stuff.

I want to push this off into the next post, though.

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Games Workshop Dungeon Rooms, Caverns, Dungeon Lairs.

March 6, 2025

Look up the Games Workshop product Dungeon Rooms, Caverns, and Dungeon Lairs. There was a Phase 1 that were in color but drawn simply. There have been attempts to make more like that from Inked Adventures, but they aren’t as cartoony and colorful as the Phase 2 GW ones, and there’s a bit of nostalgia for me with these in particular. There are also colorful tiles from GW’s Warhammer Quest game which is apparently seeing a resurgence. The difficulty for people is that WHQ is also out of print and expensive on the secondhand market.

The first problem is that the old out of print GW floors were scaled too small, they weren’t 1″ squares. I discovered that when I bought the Rooms and Caverns sets off Noble Knight. After re-assembling the cut-out pieces and scanning them, I’m now trying to get the scans repaired where the white rumpled cut edges are showing. Then I can resize.

The next concern is coming up with a method to keep them from sliding around too much. I think a textured backing and using them on a big sheet of felt on the tabletop could do it just fine. Adhesives would fail over time and attach when not desired, transfer / remove ink, etc.

Last I think is whether I’d laminate them. Because the back can’t be too slippery, I’d have to attach a backing after lamination, which means they can’t be double-sided.

The upside is it’s a product that can be printed inexpensively by a company but would take a ton of ink and produce not-so-great results if done on a home printer. Packs flat so shipping is easy. And for the user, storage is much easier than 3d dungeon tiles. This last one is mainly what I care about.

There are also a lot of chipboard material dungeon tiles from WotC and Paizo. Think like board game components that you punch out of a whole sheet. These are okay but aren’t cartoonishly brightly colored so they don’t fit in perfectly with the GW sets. Also, plenty of these tiles look like 2000s 3d renders (for a while I was trying to take screen captures of game environments from the Neverwinter Nights 1 adventure toolkit, but they were too pixelated and low-poly so they looked inescapably rendered).

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Percentage Learning Mechanic

March 1, 2025

It’s possible I got this house rule from another game, maybe Lejendary Adventures. It’s used for less-important skills that a PC might pick up if you’re playing 1e or something that lacks a skill system, but isn’t used for tasks like combat or casting. You also wouldn’t use this for trivial things like smoking or narrow tasks like skinning deer.

Or, if you’re writing a game, maybe this is how all your advancement works.

To start with, determine the PC’s skill level on a percentile scale. Maybe equal to their relevant ability score for novel skills or double that for things people in their social class probably have exposure to. That’s their success chance, and they need to roll under that on d%. Add a negative modifier for really difficult conditions, but for easy tasks give double the bonus you think they should get.

If they fail (rolling over the skill percentage), make a note of that. At the end of the game session, award +1% to every skill if it had at least one failure during the session, and if 2+ failures, then there’s an X in 10 chance to get an extra 1%.

This means you can’t improve a skill if you don’t use it, you learn fast at the start but slower if you’re really good at it, you learn more by taking big risks instead of grinding easy tasks. You’re incentivized to do a wide variety of tasks throughout the session.

It can work really well for learning languages.

If you use this as your main advancement mechanic, consider throwing in additional skill point awards which players can choose to apply to any skill that’s 75% or under. Maybe a bonus 1% for finally defeating the bandit lord, 1% for rescuing the brainwashed prince he kidnapped, 1% for returning the entire treasure the bandits stole. A given session might offer 0-2 of these achievement-based bonuses.

I also think if you’re using this as your core advancement mechanic, it could work to help limit the power of casters by saying the caster has to improve each spell independently, just like any warrior would need to learn all their weapons independently. But, to reflect that there is some cross-knowledge where knowing Shortsword makes you a little better at picking up Longsword, you’d need an adjustment in there. Maybe half your chance to hit comes from the specific Fireball skill and half from your Evocation group skill.

Another cool percentile rule I found from Basic Roleplaying (I think) is that on any percentile roll, doubles are a critical, but it’s a critical success if it’s a success, critical failure if it’s a failure. So this naturally produces critical outcomes 10 in 100 which is equivalent to 2 in 20 for natural 1s and natural 20s on a d20 roll. But it also spreads those out in a way that makes high-skill characters more likely to get critical successes and low-skill characters more likely to get critical failures. And that just feels right.

Anyway, I think this is a cute idea, but I’m also just very happy with the comprehensive secondary skill system and using d20 under ability score checks for miscellaneous tasks.

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Start In A Tavern But It’s Crazy

February 27, 2025

Start in a tavern but subvert expectations. Best done with experienced players, because you can’t subvert expectations until they have them.

The tavern gets attacked while they’re in it and the PCs can choose to defend it alongside the crappy guy they were about to barfight with, or help the attackers destroy the bar, or just escape, or whatever else they decide to do. Turns out the whole town is being attacked. Townsfolk running around with the stupid material goods with which they’re about to become refugees, doors hanging open, horses scampering through the streets. Crisis = opportunity.

The PCs are the staff and owners of the tavern and adventurers start a stupid barfight, and everything gets smashed, and because they’re financially ruined they have to do something to pay their taxes and such, and the only good opportunity is adventuring. They keep encountering situations where NPC adventuring parties do the kinds of hideous activity that always seems to happen when players are young and taking their ids out for a walk, but now we see it from the outside perspective where regular folks are getting slaughtered and pillaged and the PC party is walking into the aftermath. Works best in a slow-advancement campaign or as a 1-5 shot because if the PCs get some levels and magic items they’ll just become regular adventurers.

Each PC is the captain of a landwalking tavern, directing their premises’ wind-powered shuffling to capture the best possible ingredients and location for good sales while avoiding monsters, bandits, tax collectors, hostile restaurant critics, destructive adventuring parties, and other conflict. See also: strandbeests, Last Oasis video game, Howl’s Moving Castle, and (if you must) Mortal Engines.

Wake up in a tavern and there’s local NPCs all around similarly surprised to look out the window and discover the tavern is floating is a void or planted in another plane or adrift in the ocean or atop a mountain or deep in a dungeon. The NPCs in the tavern have trades which they can employ if you bring back a supply of the material they use to produce supplies and adventuring equipment. See also: The Raft and Void Train video games.

Wake up still drunk to find you’ve shrunk to the size of a 25mm figurine and must adventure through the tavern until you figure out how to undo the shrinking magic. See also: Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Chadrather’s Bane in Dungeon #18.

The PCs are time-travelers on a one-way trip to the past to kill a horrible guy who is about to give a pivotal speech in a tavern, but opposing evil time-travelers from the future who want to rescue and support him arrive to prevent it. The PCs participate in historical battles as they continue to try to defeat him, and their knowledge of how those battles actually went will serve them well – although, typically the small-scale action is rarely recorded effectively and most people learn overviews instead of all of the hyperlocal after-battle reports. The good guys just have the one send-back to the past (replacement PCs come from others sent back at the same time but scattered geographically due to disruption in the time stream) but the bad guys get to send multiple waves of reinforcements who have updated “historical” knowledge based on what has happened in the past-campaign so far. Great for historical wargamers, but as a DM be prepared to be corrected about everything!

Discover fresh untapped dungeons under the tavern. The PCs can use the operations of the tavern to hide their excavations and launder the loot so the King doesn’t take it all under the Treasure Trove law. But snoopy inspectors and auditors are always trying to see if their suspicions are true! Extra difficulty if they are trying to hide it from the tavern owner too!

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Modular D&D

February 25, 2025

5.5e D&D comes out and the community splits, like always.

I want to remind everyone that it is possible for WotC to produce a version of the game where the rules are written in a modular way. That is, you could decide to use the Type A XP advancement charts, Type C XP award system, Type C core races plus a few specific extras, Type A for your martial classes but Type D for casters and Type B for Rogues, a Type M equipment list that’s representative of late Bronze Age tech level, Type B weaponless combat rules, Type C surprise but Type A initiative, etc. Then your group would just print out the pages and everyone would have binders for your group’s PHB.

If the company needed to send out an update to fix an exploit or ambiguity, just download that page and print it out if your group even uses that page.

WotC can’t / won’t do that because it’s not profitable, even though it would be the best game for each individual group.

The only downside for the community would be that when you visit another table, you have to print out their binder, because there isn’t a single standardized D&D. Although one could argue that with variants, expansions, setting-specific extras and changes, and all the house rules, there is no standardization, and the idea that a “Type A across the board” is the vanilla game could stand in for that standard.

No reason why we couldn’t do it ourselves, sans profit motive as we’re hobbyists. But it would be difficult because it’s an openhearted heartbreaker – inclusive of all the ways the author doesn’t want to play but by necessity must include, because it is the soul of the project.

(By the way I don’t use the WordPress feature to auto-email you all for every post. Just once in a while. Don’t want to bug you.)

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Different Ways To Use Treasure XP

February 23, 2025

In 1e AD&D, XP is awarded based on monsters defeated and treasure recovered from dungeons. PCs typically get 75% – 80% of their XP from loot (1:4 to 1:5 ratio of monster-to-loot XP) (thanks, John!). This means gaining treasure really pushes them up in level. This can cause issues when interacting with the training rules, which state that you pay 1,500 GP x current level in training costs. If a Thief needs 1,500 GP to train from level 1 to 2, but only needs 1,250 XP to be eligible, it’s not possible to earn enough money to train without going over, so there’s a time when the Thief is eligible to train but can’t afford it.

One way to deal with this is given in the DMG section on training: a DM should consider offering free or reduced-cost training at very low levels as a reward for completing missions for NPCs. Later, when the XP tables offer a little more room, this reward method can be phased out. XP required roughly doubles each level while training cost increases at a slower rate, so just getting free training from levels 1->2 and 2->3 can get you over the initial hump.

The book doesn’t suggest it, but you could also just reduce training cost for those levels. Presumably trainers for low levels are much more available, as everything that is higher-level is rarer demographically.

One more hitch: magic items retained for their use instead of sold for GP give a smaller amount of XP, usually about 10-15% of the GP sale value. I wrote a little about this earlier here.

What I’ve found is that this by the book method imposes on the DM a limit on how much magic can be placed in low-level dungeons. Place too much treasure and the PCs will rocket through the first few levels. Which I want to avoid, as I like to scale the advancement rules for everyone to have roughly 1-2 sessions to feel what it’s like to be at each level before moving on.

How 1e approaches gold pieces and experience points is illustrative that as much of a mess 1e can be sometimes, it’s clear there was strong game design work being done. Encumbrance is stated in coin weight. Monsters grant XP for defeat but their treasure is most of it, and that treasure is worth 1 XP per gold coin value. There are remarkably few currencies in the game system until high level when magical aging and Constitution become limiting factors. People joke about “did you win” when you play D&D, but if you look at it simply as a wargame, you win by gathering treasure!

While I like the 1e by the book rule on this, here are a couple house rules and how they change the game.

THE COMMONEST HOUSE RULE: NO TREASURE XP

Well, one of them. A lot of 1e DMs just don’t award XP for treasure. If you don’t change anything else, this makes advancement extremely slow! But one thing it does, by detaching treasure from XP, is allow the DM freedom to place loot without worry about excessive level gain. We lose an interesting choice (whether to sell a magic item for XP or keep and use it), and it can lead to bad habits like giving out excessive magic items. It also diverts the players’ attention away from acquiring treasure and toward killing of monsters; in typical 1e if the party encounters some Giant Snakes and there’s no treasure in sight, there’s little reason to attack them. If XP only comes from monsters, the players will see them as XP pinatas and act a lot more bloodthirsty.

This house rule works for DMs who want to put some magic items into the campaign early on, but don’t want an incentive for the players to sell them.

To be successful, you’ll want to increase monster XP value, perhaps to the 2e Monstrous Compendium method. This way the PCs still advance at a reasonable rate.

XP FOR MAGIC ITEM SALE ONLY

This is what my dad always did when I was growing up. Still does! It’s just like the above, except you do use the “XP Value” listing for all those magic items, by getting the XP value if you sell the item without using it.

This is nice because there’s a choice in there, and you are putting to good use an element of the game that’s in the books.

He awards the XP for a sold magic item to the seller if it was their share of the loot, or split among the group if the whole group decided to sell it.

The outcome of this tends to be that the DM is likelier to place magic items, has less balancing / calculation work to do when placing magic items, and one type of mistake in placement doesn’t also mean a mistake in a huge XP award.

From a game design philosophy, while it’s nice to have two things be combined or directly linked, it is also often nice to have separate levers you can pull. I could digress into a dozen directions on this, but one great example is how 2e magic weapons give a bonus to hit, damage, AND weapon speed – but does it make sense that all magic weapons are always faster? I also prefer 1e magic armor to be lighter but not weightless, but I could see someone not changing the weight at all.

SPECIAL INTERESTS

In his First Fantasy Campaign document, Dave Arneson describes a method for PCs to get bonus XP for spending money on a “special interest”, which could be knowledge, fine wine, partying, or whatever else the player came up with like donations to a religious institution. It’s unclear exactly how he handled the value gained thereby; for example, if you acquired a collection of ceramic giraffes by spending 1,000 GP, and gained 1,000 XP, could you then sell some of the collection? If that were possible, you could gain XP from the same wealth repeatedly, which feels like a loophole and not the intent.

How I’d implement this is, instead of granting the XP on recovering the treasure on an adventure, you get XP for blowing treasure on something that gives you no benefit. If it does give you a benefit, your XP award is lower based on the value of the benefit you did receive. If you spend 1,000 GP on frilly pillows and your collection is actually worth 500 GP if you ever sold it, I’d note down the collection’s value as 500 GP and award the player 500 XP for the destroyed value in what non-enthusiasts will be unwilling to pay for it. If you bought a tun of fine wine, you wouldn’t get XP yet, but would when you (or your guests) drink it.

By awarding XP not on treasure gained but treasure wasted, it encourages the players to spend. Normally glumly hoarding is a high-level problem to consider, and much ink has been spilled on how to give high-level PCs cool things to spend their wealth on. By putting the spending in their hands, the DM gets the spending to happen but they’re also happy about it.

Incidentally, 1e has an upkeep rule, where leveled characters have living expenses of 100 GP x level per month. I saw something similar in the 0e Ryth Chronicle / Rythlondar campaign notes, where weekly PC expenses were 0.5% of the XP total (lower than 1e’s upkeep until name level, higher thereafter, and less simple to calculate). This exists to pressure players not to waste large amounts of time, for example casting Continual Darkness on 500 metal shavings and packing them into a blowpipe to really mess up someone’s day. Or, if a shop’s inventory changes monthly, simply waiting as many months as are needed to get the item you want (almost certainly not the DM’s intent when writing that shop). Or, handing over a wand for recharging, and instead of having to go back on the adventure without it (which is supposed to be one of the important tradeoffs for the procedure), just waiting a month for it to be done. Players don’t like required upkeep costs! But if personal upkeep is subsumed under Special Interest expenditure, not only do you not need that separate pressure, but also players will gleefully do it to themselves faster than 100/lv/mo. Just be sure to require the Special Interest expenditure if they’re just spinning their wheels.

At low level, the player is able to indulge in special interests at will in town because their needs are scant and the town’s supply can fulfill them. At around level 4 or 5 the amounts needed will become extreme. This is a feature! The player must begin to interact with the environment to get what he needs, for example building roads and patrolling them to ensure caravans can come, clearing the sea-ways of pirates to make shipping safer, or even traveling to secure his supply of decadent delights personally. And, should he discover a stash of wine in some dungeon cellar or receive a valuable gift from a noble, he may just consume it himself instead of selling it in town for money.

One more thing to consider is that the original intent of 1 XP per 1 GP was that the gold had to be acquired via hazardous adventure. If you just sit around in town running a business, you don’t gain XP for doing it. Adventurer Conqueror King disagreed, assumed there were no such exclusion, and built that rule into its milieu. Marcus Licinius Crassus, from whose name we get the word “crass”, and who was supposedly killed by pouring molten gold down his throat to finally sate his thirst for wealth, would have been rather high level and had enough HP to live for a short time during that kind of execution! So it’s up to you whether you want to keep track of how much wealth the party has acquired via adventure, and limit Special Interest gains to that. Or don’t, because the bookkeeping burden makes that sound like a pain in the butt, especially since most parties don’t acquire much gold through business and rewards.

By the way, I call this “Squandering” and the noun for the monies so blown is “Squander”.

CAROUSING

Jeff Rients wrote Party Like It’s 999 here. It’s a specific type of Special Interest which Arneson did lay out as “Wine, Women, and Song”, the type of splurging and partying iconic in Conan the Barbarian downtime, and it’s a perfect application of the rule because it’s ALL waste. We can assume the goodwill generated among local drunks and well-wishers has little tangible value. So I’d be happy to award full XP for the amount caroused away.

Carousing has another wrinkle: it specifically limits how much you can carouse weekly based on the area’s population density and sophistication (village, town, city), gives Thieves a little bonus, and adds an element of risk. You’re better off carousing in safer, smaller towns until mid-level, and as your XP needs increase you’re incentivized to travel to bigger towns to carouse. Pushing that risk is a great player choice. Acquiring better travel abilities as you level up feels very rewarding when you have more reasons to travel. The carousing mishaps range from funny to punishing depending on the campaign, but you could rewrite some.

Players who worked hard to improve the carousing situation in the area might ramp up their die roll or the GP multiplier for that die roll, replicating the improvements Arneson’s players could invest in to secure Special Interest materials.

Because of the weekly carousing volume limits, it seems unlikely that Rients simultaneously used the 1e upkeep rules, because the time expenditure to carouse becomes too expensive. As Special Interests above, I would keep some monthly upkeep cost in the campaign for times when the party isn’t carousing but still just laying around growing their hair.

One bummer about Carousing is that it doesn’t seem to appeal to self-restricting religious types like Monks, Paladins, and some Clerics. You could very well just give XP for tithed amounts in excess of the required minimum, include no mishap chance or limit, but still impose the monthly upkeep because they did not Carouse.

SO WHAT

Rules are tools you can use to get the game spinning in the way you want.

What other ideas on XP for treasure can you point me to?

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Portable – Material Densities

February 21, 2025

I’ve found this reference sheet of material densities to be really handy at the gaming table. But when I was going to post it, I realized it’s not even my wording. I got it from Paul Hughes here:

https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=6387

And I really didn’t do much but edit it down, so there’s no good reason for me to post my PDF. It belongs in a packet alongside your DMG.

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Portable – Loot By Level

February 19, 2025

Sometimes it’s nice to have a quick reference for what kind of loot you should drop into a dungeon level. This isn’t meant to be a hard rule. Here’s the PDF so I know it’ll print well for you, and the Word doc so you can edit it if you want.
https://1d30.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/portable-loot-by-level.pdf
https://1d30.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/portable-loot-by-level-1.doc

The whole page grew out of a thought I had about monsters that need a +1 weapon to hit, and what level PCs would be when they encounter it. Because it seems to me that the best-case scenario for interesting gameplay is that the PCs encountering the creature would have some +1 weapons, so they feel the special defense’s effects but can still fight it. Or they might have no +1 weapons and need to get really creative or run away, which is also a fun encounter. But if they all have +1 weapons they might not even know the special defense exists, and they certainly don’t struggle to deal with it. So there’s a sweet spot for when PCs should acquire magic weapons of a certain + value, and you can detect that sweet spot by comparing to the HD of monsters that have that defense level.

Then I got to thinking about armor. Besides the weird outlier of scalemail, there’s a pattern to the 1e armor tables. The optimized types have good AC value for their movement rate, and the clunky types have a MV rate one step worse (3″ lower) with the same AC. Clearly an adventurer would prefer to wear the armor on the left rather than the right:

  • Leather (AC 8 MV 12) – Padded (AC 8 MV 9)
  • Studded/Ringmail (AC 7 MV 9)
  • Scale (AC 6 MV 6)
  • Chainmail (AC 5 MV 9)
  • Banded (AC 4 MV 9) – Splint (AC 4 MV 6)
  • Plate (AC 3 MV 6)

Or, categorize by MV rate:

  • MV 12: Leather (AC 8)
  • MV 9: Banded (AC 4), Chainmail (AC 5), Studded/Ringmail (AC 7), Padded (AC 8)
  • MV 6: Plate (AC 3), Splint (AC 4), Scale (AC 6)

This can be cross-referenced to the Expert Hireling Armorer skill level table:

  • 01-50: Studded/Ringmail, Scale
  • 51-75: Above plus Splint
  • 76-90: Above plus Chainmail
  • 91-00: All armor (so, above plus Banded and Plate)

One way to view the armorer skill table is the possible sophistication of armor available – so it could be used for availability in a region or even the technology level of a culture. Since leatherworking and weaving/tailoring are presumably always available, a reason for scalemail to exist emerges:

  • Peasants: Padded (AC 8 MV 9)
  • Low Tech: Leather (AC 8 MV 12), Studded/Ringmail (AC 7 MV 9), Scale (AC 6 MV 6)
  • Medium-Low Tech: Leather, Studded/Ringmail, Splint (AC 4 MV 6)
  • Medium Tech: Leather, Chainmail (AC 5 MV 9), Splint
  • High Tech: Leather, Banded (AC 4 MV 9), Plate (AC 3 MV 6)

You might see poorer fighters in a Medium Tech setting using Studded/Ringmail because that’s the best they can afford. Same with some using Scale in a Medium-Low Tech setting.

Let’s get back to magic items. In the 1e DMG there are two contradictory methods for determining weight and bulk of magic armor. One says magic armor is one MV category faster and weighs half (DMG 28), the other says magic armor has no weight or MV reduction (DMG 164). There’s another layer here with armor bulk, and how bulk is almost always correlated to MV rate, but we can skip it for now.

I prefer the former rule because it gives you a reason to choose something other than magic platemail at MV 9 if magical instead of 6 if nonmagical. Magic chainmail or magic banded gives MV 9, but a slightly worse AC.

So, in terms of armor desirability, armor with the same AC and MV rate should be about as desirable, even if the + value is different. There’s a slight benefit in item saves, but nobody ever thinks about that. So, you’d expect +1 Chainmail to be about as good as +2 Banded. Or +1 Plate to be as good as +2 Splint. And because leather armor is specifically desired by Thieves, Assassins, and Druids (and multiclass Gnome Illusionists if you use that specific rule BTB), it’s probably just as desirable on average as the same caliber suboptimal armor types, although its AC base is worse and its book value is lower. Elven Chain is super desirable because of its concealability and usefulness by light-armored characters, especially Barbarians.

Anyway, considerations like that are why I gave a variety of categories of magic armor to be placed in dungeons of a particular difficulty level. Similar considerations for magic daggers and ammo vs. other magic weapons.

I spread out Bags of Holding based on their ratio of container capacity to the bag’s own static weight, with better ratios associated with lower level loot.

Other items I eyeballed based on when the party’s caster might get sufficient spell uses to fulfill a full day’s need for that magic for one character.

WHY

I want to make sure that, when I’m tired and not thinking clearly, I can refer to a chart to drop loot into the game or to quickly populate a dungeon level with loot, without adding in something that screws up the delicate PC powers vs. level-appropriate challenges dance we have going on. If I want to break that with something unusual, that’s fine, but it’ll be a deliberate choice.

Also, players absolutely have the opportunity to choose to visit a tougher area with tougher monsters to get potentially better loot, even if they are lower level than the area’s difficulty. If that happens, they get the loot up to the maximum given for the area, not for their level.

Note that you still have to place loot with an eye to total GP value compared to the XP value of challenges overcome to earn it (3:1 or 4:1 seems good, I use 3:1, meaning 75% of XP comes from loot and 25% from monsters). You’ll find that especially with barebones magic swords and daggers it’s easy to leapfrog the level-appropriate bonuses if you don’t have a chart like this to refer to.

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