Once a mighty bastion against evil fell to diabolical treachery...

A while back J.D. Barnes put a call out to the RPG blogosphere to take a look at his latest project, a megadungeon meets small press zine called The Ruined Fortress of the Evil Overlord.  Normally I only look at PDFs here at Impossible Boulder, but Barnes is going back to basics with his foray into megadungeonry and that interests me. You might be thinking OSR and you're right in that TRFotEO is ostensibly an old school dungeon; however, the goals and results are more in line with the artisanal movement. Indie publishing in the RPG industry almost always takes the form of PDF products or print on demand and Barnes is deliberately eschewing that in favour of product that is hand made and available only directly through him. 

The Thing Itself

The dungeon arrived in a manila envelope and I was eager to open it up and see exactly what an artisinal RPG product might look like. It turns out that takes the form of a small, stable-bound blue booklet with an unattached cover. The cover threw me off at first, but I soon discovered that it also doubles as a map and the reason it is unattached is for ease of use.

The cover is a very nice touch, if unusual. The hand drawn isometric map looks good, but between faded ink, spotty printing and crosshatching/shading that didn't make it through the scanning and printing process it was difficult to read. The map could do with some post scan work being done on it in image editor of some kinds. I think cleaning up and thickening the lines would go a long way for improving legibility of the map and a lighter shade of blue might make the lines pop more.

Moving on from the cover is the actual meat of the booklet, 28 pages of pure old school dungeon. The paper is of high quality but, as with the map, there are places where the ink is spotty. Future printings would benefit from experimenting with ink weights and print quality. I wouldn't say that this booklet hits the quality that the author is aiming for, but keep in mind that this is the first printing. Nobody can be expected to get things perfect on the first try and it is going to take a few tweaks before we start seeing the expected print quality.

Initial Reading & Alterations For Play

I took an initial read through the dungeon before throwing it out on the table for my players to clean out. I was pleased to see that the voice was casual while remaining concise and the text was free of any glaring errors as far as I could see.

Ruined Fortress is very much an old school dungeon with a great set of wandering monsters and encounters that could have been arranged more gracefully. The booklet uses several dice rolls to determine those encounters and the information is not communicated with a table and is instead spread out across enough paragraphs to slow a GM down during play. The dungeon layout is also quite old school and falls into the Paul Jaquays style of mapping. Not every room has anything of interest in it, but all of the larger rooms do and once you account for random encounters and patrolling monsters (such as the blue dragon) the ruined fortress should be a very lively place.

I should note that at least one room in the dungeon felt a little forced, as if the designer didn't really know what to put there. I am speaking of the shield room, a room filled with stacks of shields which happen to have the world's worst alarm system: a fragile glass bottle that has been precariously placed underneath a shield so that it falls when disturbed. I'm at a loss as to the purpose of this room. The trap was weird and seemingly ineffective (what good is a single such potion? There should at least be one on each stack of shields.) It also wouldn't have been detectable by a party in any way short of dumb luck, which places it in that Gygaxian class of traps which are unfair because nobody would ever think to do X. This was really the only room that sent me for a loop, but it still strikes me as bizarre a week later. Still, weird traps like this are part of the charm of old school dungeons and I can't bring myself to be mad at it.

After I had a feel for the dungeon I made a few alterations so that I could slide it into my current Dungeon World campaign.

1. Since I only have the first level of the Ruined Fortress, I turned the place into a (mostly) single level ruined monastery.
2. I moved it to a hill overlooking a ruined town.
3. I changed the back story so that it fit with the monastery theme; however, it didn't end up being important for the adventure anyway.
4. I ignored all of the monster stats since they don't carry over to the Dungeon World system. Note that I did use them as guidelines for my conversions.

Highlights From Play

I don't want to go through the entire dungeon here, if you want that then you should pick up a copy of the dungeon for yourself. Instead I will cover a few of the highlights from our run through the dungeon. I should note that all of these things happened very organically and at least two of them were generated in from encounter tables.

The Berbalang

Berbalangs are, to my knowledge, a new monster from the mind of Barnes and by pure serendipity the encounter surrounding the berbalang encounter fit into my game very well.

The hook I used to bring my players to this dungeon was that one of the players was trapped on the Astral Plane and the 'monastery' housed a point where the fabric between planes was weak. The PCs in the material plane would need to visit the monastery and perform a ritual in tandem with the Astral PC in order to bring him over.

Since berbalangs hunt via astral projection it was the perfect monster to have an encounter with which could involve both the astral and material PCs. The astral PC protected the other PCs from the berbalang while they explored the fortress and sought out the location for the ritual.

Goblin Tribe

My group of players managed to befriend some wandering goblins, which brought them back to Gooch. Upon learning that they had human prisoners and that Gooch was a nasty piece of work (what did they expect from Goblins?) one of the heroes challenged Gooch to a duel for leadership of the tribe, and won. This will surely be a problem for later on.

Rival Adventurers

While wandering through the dungeon, searching for the ritual location, the heroes stumbled upon a rival adventuring party. The meeting did not go well, especially not with several goblin in tow. The silver-tongued bard managed to smooth things over, but only if the party gave up looting rights in exchange for free passage to and from the ritual chamber. That turned out to be a mistake when the "heroes" used their newfound goblin tribe to ambush and mug the adventurers they had previously struck a deal with.

Avoiding the Blue Dragon

The blue dragon that wanders the halls of the ruined keep monastery showed up regularly on my encounter rolls, but always seemed to be a room or two a way. This lead to the players picking their way around him and sneaking by regularly. A mistake on my part was giving the dragon the wrong name, Saul, which lead to Breaking Bad jokes

Final Thoughts

This is a quirky dungeon that nails the old school, do-it-yourself adventures you used to see people pass around or share in zines. There are a few production kinks that I am confident will be worked out and none of those kinks render the final product any less usable. The dungeon won't appeal to everyone and especially not those interested in a cohesive, thematic dungeon like you would find in the pages of modern Dungeon Magazines or a Paizo product. This is a little more punk and a lot more old school, it's closer to what you would get before Desert of Desolation came along and changed the way dungeons and adventures were written. Odds are, you already know if that's what you want out of a dungeon. If not, you probably aren't in the target audience for this product.

If you want to take a look through the Ruined Fortress then you can get a copy for yourself from here.

Categories: Adventure, megadungeon, Old School, Review, Ruined Fortress of the Evil Overlord, Wielding a Bohemian Earspoon

Grotesque

In case you haven't noticed, I'm rather enamoured with Technoir. I have rambled on about the game previously, so I won't bore you with another glowing review. Instead I'm going to tell you that I put together a transmission for the game and you can download it right now for free.

For those unfamiliar with Technoir and its transmissions, let's just say that they are a group of NPCs, Factions, Locations, Objects, Threats and Events that a GM links together to create an adventure. Transmissions are intended for use with Technoir, but aside from some NPC stats everything in the transmission could be used in another science fiction/cyberpunk game without issue.

As you may have surmised from the above image, the title of the transmission is Grotesque and it adds a mutant population and biotech industry to any cyberpunk city you want. I wrote the transmission so that you could plug it into any cities you have dreamed up or created using another transmission. It should work okay even if you don't have another city to plug it into, it just might be a little one dimensional.

Alright, that is all I am going to say about this. Take a gander at the transmission and maybe even give it a play. As always, I appreciate and welcome feedback.

You can download and view Grotesque here.

Categories: Adventure, cyberpunk, Technoir, transmission

Fudge Dice & Hex Crawling

You might not know this about me, but I love a good hexcrawl. I think there is something to be said for a game in which the players just strike out across the world to see what they might find. If you're not familiar with hexcrawling then head over to The Welsh Piper, he has done a great overview.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been racing to put together a zombie hack for the always enjoyable Fate System. One thing that I really wanted to put into the game was some way to put together a city for survivors to wander their way through. This thought lead me to placing a hex overlay over top my city of residence and to the realm of hexcrawling.

The Collaborative Spirit of Fate

One of the really special things about Fate and the various games that use Fate is that they have a strong collaborative spirit. In Dresden Files the players populate a city with plot elements and characters. In Diaspora they create the very planets that they will visit. Just using a random table to populate hexes doesn't mesh with this collaborative philosophy that Fate has.

If a game of Fate is going to stay true to this collaborative spirit then the players need to be more involved with the hexcrawl.

  Hexcrawlin' With Fudge Dice

1. The players should choose a starting hex. This is their hex of origin, where they start the game from or where their Headquarters is.
2. Count the hexes adjacent to the origin and build a pool of fudge dice. The pool should have 3 fudge dice for each hex.
3. Roll all of the gathered dice.
4. Each player, in turn, selects a die and places it into an adjacent hex or notes the face value in the hex. Repeat until all of the dice have been used.
5. Each of the adjacent hexes should now have a number of +, -, and ■ in them.

You should now have something like this:

You may want to click to enlarge.

The blue hex in the middle is our origin/hq hex. In case you're curious, there is a university at that location. I've highlighted the surrounding hexes in red. Unless you're at the edge of a map, one of the hexes is unreachable, or one of the hexes is already explored you are always going to have 6 of them. That means most of time the group will need to roll 18dF. You might want to do things in such a way that each player rolls 1dF on their turn until 18dF have been rolled if you don't have enough dice.

I went and rolled this out and, as luck would have it, I rolled six of each face. I placed them each into different hexes, as you can see above.

The last step is to define what those results actually mean. I suggest that each result corresponds to a fact of some kind about the hex. + results are things that are potentially beneficial to the player. - results are the opposite, potentially negative things. ■ are neutral, something that could go either way or that is indifferent. You may wish to make  ■ results environmental factors. Players can combine like results together to write a fact that is more "powerful" or significant.

For a great collaborative experience you should write out these facts as a group, but if you want a more surprising game you could have the GM fill out the facts secretly. If you would like a middle ground then you could opt to have  ■  results be GM secrets and allow the players to fill in + and - normally.

Facts for the above map (starting with the topmost hex and proceeding clockwise):

1. There are friendly survivors here. There is a food source here. One of the friendly survivors is a carrier. There are many scavenged out buildings.
2. The coast guard regularly returns here to rescue survivors. The roads here have been barricaded.
3. A friendly group of survivors is trapped in an apartment building here. There are damaged boats here.
4. Zombie hoards roam this hex in large numbers.
5. There is a hospital here. The hospital is occupied by a dangerous cult. A burst water main floods the streets.
6. Zombies roam this hex. A fire has damaged many of the buildings here.

I stuck with the zombie apocalypse theme mentioned above, but this method could work with any setting. Actually, I think it would work much better with other settings. Zombie apocalypses are somewhat limited in their options.

You could also go a more traditional route and have positive, negative, and neutral encounter tables that you roll on after the values have been distributed on the hexes. This would require coming up with a new set of tables for every crawl, unless you made them very generic.

Categories: Adventure, Fate, Fudge, Game Design, Hexcrawl, Welsh Piper, Zombie