Hunters & Killers

A dungeon contains two main things, as I see it - monsters and treasure. One stops (easy) access to the other, and so you trick, maim and murder the monsters to get the treasure - especially when you're using gold-as-xp (as you should). Whilst this is obviously pretty simplistic, ignoring all subtlety and additional functionality, I'm looking more at the relationship between the players and the monsters here. Removing or negating them is a means to an end, which might mean you basically don't need to worry as much about who/what/why - although I still do this, as do most DMs worth their salt - their weaknesses and pressure-points are often entwined with their history, relationships etc, enriching the game-play.

Which is just a complicated way of saying you kill them because they're in the way.

I'm currently thinking about a game wherein you are (primarily) monster hunters, rather than slayers. This entirely changes how the players relate to the monsters - they are the driving purpose, they are the main event. Consequently, how we as DMs work with the monsters has to change to reflect this, thematically, in presentation and mechanically.

(It'll also change the XP calculations - though I'd still probably link it to "treasure", but the treasure being the reward money for claiming the bounty)

Thematics

There's a couple of schools of thought to be applied here - what does the monster mean, or represent*. Integrating monsters into the (super)natural fauna of the land gives them context, a place, relationships with the rest of the system but simultaneously runs the risk of making them a bear or wolf with magic powers, which is a bit shit. This links heavily into presentation, discussed in that section. However, you could argue that animals are not monsters, that animals are an expected element, a known quantity. Monsters are (in my view) essentially aberrations of the natural order.

Taking on this concept of the monster as an aberration, we can play with some pretty fun ideas - they represent a wrongness in the area, whether that be social or environmental - the spirit of your murdered brother, or woodland furies emerging to slaughter woodsmen. With this, you introduce the concept of having two immediate routes to solve the issue - hunt and kill the monster (treat the symptom) or attempting to solve the issue causing the aberration in the first place (cure what ails). This concept is used in The Witcher 3, which is a really good game you should try out - although you do sometimes end up fighting the beastie after solving the problem, albeit in some modified way, such as a weakened state, with greater foreknowledge, or with some form of specialized preparation informed by the root cause - put the spirit to rest with their original murder weapon, or prepare an oil with the weeds atop their unhallowed resting place.

Presentation

The monsters themselves must be presented according to their themes - the must fall into place with their respective systems, whether this is naturalistic "monsters" having nesting and food, or the aberrant monsters presented in such a manner to reflect their nature, and the ill they represent. Either approach can give the campaign a more "folky" feel, relying on the local population, their legends and rumours, a lot of spent in the rural areas rather than the cities and towns. 

Divorced from this, the monsters must be capable of being hunted. This can mean innate stealth, necessitating tracking, great speed or flight, requiring some manner of trapping them or attacking them at rest, or just being them so tough and terrifying that a cunning plan is needed to take them down.

Mechanics

The above points should generally somehow be reflected mechanically - with a lot of these, as with most OSR & OSR adjacent stuff, is in rulings and presentation rather than encoded into rules specifically.

A principal challenge with a hunted monster is ensuring the actual confrontation is interesting - I'm sure we've all experienced the players blitzing a single powerful opponent to death in a single round. HP Bloat is not enough to give this feeling of a genuinely dangerous monster worthy of hunting - elements such as speed and stealth, as with presentation, are key. Tapping into the folky nature of the game, having very specific weakness (which, of course, can be discovered by characters investigating sufficiently) are a both a classic element of such legends, as well significantly toughening up the monster itself.

Of course, an infestation of monsters, rather than a single, powerful creature, entirely side-steps this issue, but changes the entire relationship of the hunt - an extermination rather than a hunt. However, many of the other points above still apply, such as infestation-as-aberration, especially in the case that the infesting creature is otherwise normal in many respects.

*Not that I generally ascribe meaning to anything in my games in terms of real-world stuff, but more a sense of history or integration, or going the other way, a negation or lack of history/integration, and indeed, meaning.

Inverse Energy Empire - Vampire Barony, Beggar Kingdom

I was re-reading A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History and this is what happened.

Societies, being constructed primarily of energy and controls for energy flow, have a shadow form - The Inverse Energy Empire, vampire societies. Everything is stolen and pirated, hence the archaic and dated forms, all aping the host kingdom ~200 years prior. In the younger societies, these vampires are the barbarians, and can usher in the night of civilisation easiest, as are hosts weakened by plague and war - finishing off the host in this state ensures a swift, sharp end to the vampire mirror. An exhausted man succumbing to lingering illness.

Corrupted, twisted dated smoky mirror forms, a draining, a great void of energy attracting the societal output through the slow medium of history. As they change the host they change themselves in the future, a nonlinear feedback loop, the vampires plotting their future selves through past historical crimes and subtle manipulations, each a master of psychohistory.

Ruined Cities Are Really Hard

Or, dealing with hyper-dense 'dungeons'.

A lot of my stuff revolves around dead cities, ruined cities, cities where something went wrong. This is me putting some thoughts about such environments being really hard to play whilst satisfying some of the stuff I like to do.

See the city. It is dead, filled with buildings bereft of their original purpose, re-imagined as lairs, traps and storehouses for treasure. Compare this to the traditional dungeon - each room has specified exits and entrances, whereas the city offers a practical infinity of entrances, exits, and approaches. This, in addition to the sheer sizes, is a problem to be solved. Two main approaches spring to mind.

Abstraction.
Movement through and the contents of the majority of structures are abstracted, often through the use of procedural generation (this house has *dice dice* nothing) - those structures which do contain items of interest are 'zoomed' into, breaking away from the strategic (travel-based) and moving into the tactical, individual level movement, most obviously combat. This is intuitive, and means the game isn't a slog of this house is empty, after the players describe surrounding yet another ruined manor. However, such zooming immediately informs players that something interesting is about to happen, whether this been combat, traps or a secret to be discovered, meaning they will deploy in a manner to take maximal advantage of the environment. (More on environment usage later.)

The characters, assumably, will be moving and acting in a far less cautious manner during standard travel. (This could, of course, be considered in the abstraction, moving far slower in the strategic view.)  This effect ruins the opportunity for players to be surprised - although, a solution for this would be utilizing more active opponents, who attempt to engage from surprise, forcing the players into positions less advantageous as they are the defenders, adapting to the situation as dictated by the ambushers. Such an addition rewards players defining themselves scouting and planning for such situations, dictating a marching order taking advantage of the nuances of the specific buildings and streets in the encounter area.

This, however, runs into another issue within abstracting the dense urban environment. Using generic floor-plans and streets leads to strings of encounters effectively occurring within the same environment, a street lacking in interesting nuance, with the same layout of buildings offering the same opportunities. Generating an interesting and unique street and/or floorplan(s) however, is going to take time - the opposite of what a surprise engagement offers. Building a large library of interesting nuances yet somewhat universal layouts would negate this somewhat - but then the difference between the abstraction and a complete mapping shrink, reaching the point where complete mapping might make more sense. The balance between a nuanced and interesting engagement locale with the speed of the generation is very hard to strike.

Complete Mapping
Completely mapping a dense, decaying urban environment is a gargantuan amount of work, which immediately makes this option less appealing. Even ignoring this significant limitation, we run into the fact such a huge amount of information is really hard to use at the table. Each structure would require some form of representation, informing (or inspiring) the GM as to the external and internal structure of the building. This could be achieved through some form of short-hand tags or keywords, the combination of these phrases rapidly building a mental image to be imparted to the players. Such a system would require a degree of training in the GM, even just to simply learn this skill. The advantage of such complete mapping is the ability to instantly determine the form and nuance of the locale an engagement is occurring within - the GM will know through a system of tags there is a barricade which offers either side an advantage, without the need for a potentially cumbersome or slow generation system. The key to achieving a working Complete Mapping is a really effective manner of splitting information into table-usable chunks, with both player-facing and GM-facing maps and information available.

Both are hard and leave me wanting somewhat. Whadda you guys do?

The Dungeon-As-Wound

Negative space carved into the landscape, a hollowing, and a damaging of the wholeness of the material. A fissure in the ground itself. This essay considers the dungeon through the lens of an impossible necrosis of the physical material, a self-generating wound (negative space)^[1] alternatively worming and yawning wide beneath, the inhabitants either opportunistic or a consequence of this death-of-stone, spawned by the Wound itself.

Continuing this examination of the physical self-generating negative space (Wound), its very strangeness can be a wound on the expectations and experience of the observer, mirroring the wrongness of the physical artefact. It does not follow the rules of the world – by their nature, these wounds are aberrations, impossibilities in the natural order, a negative space in understanding – a wound in how we thought thinks worked, or how they should work.  This feeling is exacerbated by two common features observed within the wounds – their age, as ruins presuppose history and thereby age, and the impossible inhabitants which cannot, should not ecologically function nor survive.

Self-generating aged ruined structures are a paradox – their nature explicitly points to a history, which is rendered impossible by their very self-generating nature – how can something not here yesterday have the weight of history so deeply embedded into every rotten flagstone. One could view the ruins and devastation not as a mark of history, but resultant of the wound itself – but this rapid destruction would leave burning and sharp fresh-severed rock, not aged ruins stamped by the passage of years.

The inhabitants, those oft-hostile monsters, seemingly doing nothing but squatting in the ruins, waiting to kill those foolish enough to plumb the depths. When there is no natural ecological explanation for their existence or their actions, one must examine through the lens of the self-generating Wound, as well as the negative space/wound opened within knowledge. They could be considered a result of the physical Wound.

One view, that of the self-generating dungeon as a force possessed of a will for self-preservation, more akin to a living thing, would give these generated monsters the role of the antibody, destroying foreign bodies which enter the system of the wound. However, this reasoning, considering the dungeon-as-Wound, renders this strange. The wound is a disruption of an existing system, not a system of its own. We could instead take the view of the inhabitants as debris – the wreckage spawned by the act of wounding itself, the negative growth of the self-generating dungeon. Something akin to survivors, squatting in the ruins left behind, wounded themselves and driven to madness by it, full of violence and spite for those who come after, plumbing the depths of the damaged body the remains were once part of.

They could, alternatively, be viewed as an infection – the wound, left open, allows parasites and disease an easy entry into the ruptured body, infesting and spreading in the increasingly fetid wound, eventually, perhaps, a greater threat than the initial wound itself.

A final view is that of the inhabitants as secondary wounds, caused by the disruptive effects on the body by the original wound, like splintered bone tearing open further injuries within. Following this, the wounding of observers physically and in negative-space infliction within knowledge, are tertiary wounds, further damage by the original self-generating wound, now attacking along further vectors.

As an aside, the increased danger as the wound is probed further and deeper could be understood as a concentration of the wounding energy, as well as the wounding mechanisms being worse as the injury extended deeper into the body – something applicable to all views on the inhabitants. The remains are deeper gouged, the infection deeper and more sinister or the secondary wounding worse.

^[1]Whilst this essay is an examination of the self-generating dungeon-as-wound, the notion of the dungeon as a purposeful wound, a designated and conceived site of activity is still worth a mention. Conventional, mundane uses can be easily understood, blunting the edge of their wounding potential, simply assimilated into existing knowledge rather than being a negative space of understanding, mirroring the physical architecture of the constructed space itself. However, giving the constructed space utility does not have to cause this, if the use itself is wounding, something not understood and, potentially, not to be understood. The site of unknown/unknowable utility has the mirrored negative space wounding potential of the self-generating dungeon-as-wound, and, perhaps, intensifies the wounding of knowledge through the frustration of the unknowable use. An additional layer can be achieved when this utility is in-congruent with the physical negative space of the structure itself.