Thanks, Scott

It looks like Huge Ruined Pile will be going on semi-hiatus as Scott prepares for grad school. I want to publicly thank him for running Stonehell over these last few months. What Scott started as a pick-up game turned into a pretty good regular gaming group, and I'll miss our Wednesday night sessions.

The deep weird

I just had this (perhaps not completely novel) idea: the deeper the dungeon level, the less it conforms to the natural world known by the characters.

The first three dungeons levels might be quite naturalistic—vermin and low HD humanoids living sensibly (if violently) within the circle of life and whatnot. In one or two places, weirdness might peek through from the depths in the form of, for example, a magic well. Four to six levels down, weird elements become more common, and the relationships and behaviors of the inhabitants become less understandable. The dungeon, below level six, breaks down in terms of cause and effect. Fairy tale logic dominates the lives of inhabitants, and the structure itself sprawls in non-euclidean ways.

This could also differentiate one dungeon from another. Most dungeons, in the first few levels, would more or less resemble each other. The true and unique nature of a particular dungeon's weirdness would only be revealed within its depths.

How to Host a Dungeon

Dyson's Liche Lord map (man! I love Dyson's mapping style) lead me to How to Host a Dungeon, which is demonstrated in this video. How to Host a Dungeon is well worth the $5. It reminds me a bit of Dwarf Fortress (as amusingly illustrated here and here).

Improved Wilderness Map

I told myself last night that was going to quit messing with it for a while, but today I couldn't help making significant aesthetic and functional improvements to the wilderness map for my forthcoming 0e/LBB retro-clone, Torch & Sword. Here's the map PDF. The map is © Paul Gorman, and licensed under both the OGL 1a and the Creative Commons Attribution License—take your pick.

Wilderness map

Seeing as copies of Outdoor Survival are in short supply these days, I spent a big chunk of today drawing a wilderness hex map for my forthcoming retro-clone, Torch & Sword. I'll probably refine it a little for the final rulebook, but feel free to take a look at this one page map PDF: The map is © Paul Gorman, and licensed under both the OGL 1a and the Creative Commons Attribution License—take your pick.

Caves!

These recently discovered caves in Vietnam are inspirational:

I'm still alive

I haven't abandoned this blog, despite the recent lack of posts. Work has been insanely busy, so I decided to concentrate my scarce free time working on my Torch & Sword retro-clone project rather than blogging. I'm on vacation now, but aiming to release an alpha version of Torch & Sword by the end of the year. Posts may not be a daily occurrence for a while yet.