Defend the Dungeon

[DireWereTeddy]

This reminds me of the Reverse Dungeon book, I think, second edition. The assumptions they used were a little different, iirc, but it may be a good resource for you to check out if you can find a copy.

From what I recall, the book assumed that the adventurer's would be successful. As they cleared out each level of the dungeon, the players would then take control of the monsters on the next level which were more powerful. I don't remember much other than that.

 

[SgtFreakshow]

First off, love the idea, I might be tempted to try something similar sometime, I know that atleast some of my players would love this kinda game.

Secondly I think the best way to handle the PCs role in this would be to let them be the evil god "The Dungeon Master", they're an ancient evil being that have been bound beneath their dungeon and recent goblin mining activity have awakened it.

Now back when The Dungeon Master was still made of flesh and blood the other gods sundered it and shackled it, the sundering however was physical, so The Dungeon Master suffers from classic skizofrenia, obviously being the ghost of a god, these different personalities can act on their own accord as they're not bound by flesh and blood, so each player controls a different personality of the Dungeon Master.

The way for the players to interract with the world is then to invade the minds of lesser evil creatures (read all kinds of monsters and villains) and take over control, thus the players will be able to take control of the goblin tribe that unearthed them and from there expand their evil army.

 

[Limiate]

Thanks for the feedback.

[MENTION=27884]knightofround[/MENTION] I appreciate the insectoid/hive mind idea but I want this to be a narriative for a classic dungeon. What you’re suggesting sounds like the D&D version of Sim Ant – which honestly could be extremely fun. Thanks for the suggestion but I’ll pass.

[MENTION=38160]Ceres Ursidae[/MENTION] I actually have the original reverse dungeon (duct tape on the spine!) and I read through it carefully. There was a great bit of detail but the mechanics are more throw away and don’t contain the RTS elements I think I’m going to include. It was a good inspiration though – thank you for the suggestion!

[MENTION=82676]SgtFreakshow[/MENTION] This is really close to what I was thinking but I want the players to actually serve the demi-god, not be it so I don’t have to deal with “I’m a god, why can’t I do X?” The PCs will be proxies of the Dungeon Master.

 

[Limiate]

Here are some of the rules I've been fleshing out, sorry for the wacky formatting but I'm too lazy to spend a good deal of time on it today:


Nests
Each monster must have its own nest.
Each nest must be within a lair.

Monster Size

Nest Size​

Tiny

1x1​

Small

2x2​

Medium

4x4​

Large

8x8​

Huge

16x16​

Gargantuan

32x32​

Lairs
Each monster type must belong to a lair.
Social monsters may share lairs.
Xenophobic may share lairs with only their type.
Solo monsters must have their own lair.
Any monster entering a hostile lair will be attacked.



Food
A monster must have an amount of food determined by their size each turn.
Any monster that receives no food will leave the dungeon.
A monster may be given half rations but suffers the weakened condition during all combat encounters.


Monster Size

Food​

Tiny

0.5​

Small

1​

Medium

2​

Large

4​

Huge

8​

Gargantuan

16​

Treasure
Monsters must have treasure per their CR to maintain loyalty to the Dungeon Master.
Monsters that do not have their required treasure become restless and will not participate in tasks.
Monsters that have less than half their required treasure will steal it from other monsters with a lesser CR. If there are no lesser CR monsters, the creatures consolidate their treasure (through gambling, violence, etc) and redistribute it in order to gain full required treasure.
Monsters that have no treasure will leave the dungeon at the end of the turn.



PC Level Dungeon Loot Monster Elite or Solo
1 1000g 10g 100g
2 3000g 30g 300g
3 5000g 50g 500g
4 10,000g 100g 1,000g
5 25,000g 250g 2,500g




"Dungeon Loot" is the amount needed for the characters to reach the next level.

 

[Limiate]

/casts raise dead on thread

Hi all. While I haven’t been in the forums for a bit, I have been slowly working on Defending the Dungeon. I’m currently trying to flesh out the non-combat activities of the dungeon denizens and fill out the rooms and objects available to the players.

I’ve got 4 tasks available which are reliant on each other: Gathering > Building > Crafting > Protecting. Each of the task categories have sub tasks that are based on each ability score. Here they are, each sub skill in the order of STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA:

Gathering: Lumberjack, Hunting, Mining, Ritual Materials, Foraging, Recruiting

Building: Construction, Setup/Rearm Traps, Labor, Ritual Casting, Religion, Overseer

Crafting: Smithing, Carpenter/Mason/Tinker, Smelting, Research Ritual, Cook, Breed

Protecting: Train, Scout, Guard, Reputation, Countermeasures, Leadership

I’ll go into detail on those later or if someone reading this wants clarification.
I’ve also compiled a list of rooms that are dependant on the tasks and classic to the dungeon narriative. If anyone sees something missing, I would certainly appreciate you letting me know! Here is my current list of rooms:

Lair, Lair II, Barracks, Quarters, Storage, Dry Storage, Vault, Kitchen, Mess Hall, Workshop, Forge, Forge II, Forge III, Tinker’s Shop, Library, Laboratory, Idol, Shrine, Temple, Guard Post, Dump, Training Room, Well, Fountain, Prison Cell, Torture Chamber

As a requirement, the rooms will require excavation for the space (Mining), building of the room (construction) and various furniture (crafting) to functions. Some rooms have requirements integrated as well, for example, to build a laboratory, a forge II must exist, a library must exist and at a minimum, there needs to be one chair, a table and shelves.

My current furniture list is as follows:
Anvil, Bedding, Bellows, Bookshelf, Chair, Chamber Pot, Container (Barrel, Crate, Chest), Door, Fireplace, Flooring, Lock, Paneling, Shelves, Table
Water Basin

Alchemical Items, Rituals, Armor, Items, Weapons and Magic Items will all come from the books, so I don’t have to worry about them. What I do need to come up with is an “exchange rate” or sorts from the dungeon’s resource system to the cost of an item in the books. Since GP are primarily used to represent value, I might do that but something just doesn’t feel right about that. I’ll keep picking at it and see what I end up with, suggestions are very welcomed if you have them.

Thanks for reading!

 

[Evilhalfling]

Limiate - it sounds like your trying hard to recreate the exact mechanics of the Dungeon master games. Is this really what your players want?

- mye experiances with "defending a dungeon"
anyway in a 4e game I ran 1 scene where the PCs had a pool of 12 minions.
(8 barbarians and 4 gnolls) who had to hold off a rear attack on the PCs fortress. (a dungeon that was cleared and captured by PCs) Each minion would become bloodied on the first hit and killed on the second. Each one had a distinctive name and one line of description: insane, or group leader(+2 to hit), or sick archer (2 attacks with bow) or NEWB.

They had a fight with a rival group of gnoll minions and a necromancer.
Everytime someone a PC was playing died, they picked a new minion from the list. The new minion entered the map from out of sight immediately, but then waited to act until that players initiative.

They had a blast, some minions were heavily role-played for the round or two they each lasted. Only 3 of the 12 survived to flee. They delayed the villians for 7 rounds and the wizard entered the fight with the actual PCs bloodied, and several rounds delayed.
- good luck with your game, let us know how it goes.

 

[Limiate]

Limiate - it sounds like your trying hard to recreate the exact mechanics of the Dungeon master games.

What are the Dungeon master games? I'm not familiar with them.

Thanks for the story, I'm hoping that this game gives my players the similar experience - I intend on making them name their creatures

 

[Calzone]

Great idea! I think this is a great alternate game style for 4e.

What do you think about letting players choose a template that they apply to monsters they possess? Something like, the player's spirit reflects the decay and corruption of the evil god, so any creature they possess gains the Mummy template (or maybe a custom template that a bit weaker, it you don't want your players always playing elites).

Similarly, one thing I try to do in my dungeons is figure out how they take advantage of their natural surroundings. For instance, the kobolds built their lair in an abandoned mine, placing false floors over vertical shafts to make deadly pit traps. In game, you could maybe have a table of "random events" that can occur when doing tasks like mining, to give the dungeon a more organic feel. Something along the lines of a 10% chance for them to encounter an unusual landscape feature or for poor maintenance to allow a toxic mold to grow unchecked, something like that.

Also, what is the real goal of the dungeon? To kill all intruders? To get more sacrifices for the evil god? To amass as much treasure as possible? You may want a mechanic that offers a carrot of sorts to players when they accomplish something beneficial to the dungeon. Maybe the evil god gives them a buff or something whenever they bring fresh new sacrifices to him.

Lastly, How do the players lose? Is there an altar to the evil god that must not be destroyed? Is there a vast treasure room that should not be pilfered? Does there have to be at least one tribe of monsters remaining?

 

[Limiate]

My first play test should be this Thursday and I’m going to see how the PCs do playing a proxy of a demi-god that allows them to possess monsters. One of the things I want to figure out is if being just a spirit is enough progression wise. Thanks for the suggestion of the template – it might be a cool idea to look into – that allows the players to “specialize” in what type of monsters they control.

My “events” category is pretty barren right now but I’ve actually thought of exactly what you’re mentioning. Whenever the players dig deeper into the dungeon (making hallways, tunnels, rooms, etc) each square they remove will contain dirt, stone, metal, water or something special – be it a mine shaft, monsters lair, etc.

I appreciate you asking the questions to spur my development, it’s kind of what I did in the first place to help give me a scope of the game.

GOAL: In “normal” D&D you adventure to gain experience. Since gold has replaced experience as the leveling mechanic, the dynamic result is that players will now need to hoard gold and prevent it from being stolen. Imagine in 2e/3e when a level draining monster attacks… that’s the same feeling I want the players to experience when NPC adventuers get near their hoard.

Losing: Right now I’m going with a dungeon heart (total rip off from Dungeon Keeper) as a place holder. The game starts with the dead PCs bodies sacrificed at the altar of the “dungeon master.” If that same altar is destroyed, all the gold taken (their xp) and the monsters slain, that’s a TPK in my book.

 

[Limiate]

Hi all,

Just came to report on the first play test of D&D – Defend the Dungeon.

To create the dungeon, my players and I used MapTool, with the players using GM logins as well. Normally I will set my login to only see what a player can see but left it off since this is a play test and knew I would need to help clarify on certain questions.

When the game unceremoniously began, they had 3 kobold skirmishers and 3 kobold slingers and a large wall of “dirt” that represented fresh dungeon turf for them to rip into. They also had a 2x3 room previously dug that was the kobold’s starting lair.

Here is a brief summary of what they did:

Branched off to the right and made a 2x3 room and designated that as their future kitchen
Branched off from the kitchen to the right and made another 2x3 and designated that as the future workshop
Branched off to the left and made another 2x2 lair to allow breeding
Made 2 kobold “babies”, L0 NPCs, there after assigning them to “crap cleaning” aka Labor duties
Crafted a chair, fireplace, 2x1 table and a 1x1 table to make a functional workshop and kitchen
Crafted stone flooring, a door and wood paneling to make a dry storage room
Expanded the original lair to be 2x4, moved the 2 L0 kobolds into the lair with them to open up the 2x2 lair for recruiting
With the completed storage room, they stored 1 Food and with the open lair space, they recruited 1 Goblin

Lessons Learned

The players seemed a little off with the fact that their spirits didn’t have any character sheets and as a fundamental part of D&D culture, I guess that was an oversight on my part. Once we started though, they got comfortable with possessing monsters and that seemed to work. We didn’t bother coming up with names for the monsters but in the future we will.

The players started out by expanding their lair and we ran into the first snag. The “building” task was annoying. For example, they cleared a 2x3 room, added a fireplace, water basin and a table to it – the required furniture to make a kitchen. To them, that felt complete but the rules required the room to be “built.” So we’ve now removed building and rooms become functional the next turn once they have the needed space and furniture.

We also found that the overseer task was pretty powerful but in a good way – we’ll see if this gets out of hand later, I can see the overseer being too powerful possibly. Instead of the Charisma bonus affecting all tasks that an overseer is involved with, I’ll probably change this to letting them divide their bonus out between tasks. Also, we decided that if someone rolls a “1” on their task, the overseer can sacrifice their bonus to all other groups and re-roll the critical failure.

Mining was somewhat of a gamble in the way that the players couldn’t target their mining efforts. With the removal of building as a task, we’ll replace it with Excavating which will be specifically for expanding the dungeon. Excavation will no longer produce any materials. Mines will now be built as rooms and specifically targeted at a material – stone, fuel, treasure. I don’t like the idea of endless materials coming from mines but I don’t like the idea of having multiple mines or even tracking their growth. Right now as a placeholder, each mine will probably have 100 material available and reqire additional wood as supports to “expand the mine” when the 100 materials have been depleted.


We’re making an additional number of small tweaks and adjustments that I won’t mention here but overall they’re not major changes.

Overall Feedback

The players really enjoyed themselves. They’ve asked to play again next week and I’m stuck between continuing this play test game or adjusting the rules and having them start over. I’m more inclined to continue the current game to allow them to start testing out the other mechanics available and the higher end rooms.

They’re awfully worried about getting attacked and I’ve told them that currently it’s going to operate on a strictly a DM choice – ie I send them in when I want to. In the future, as a mechanic I have created but not implemented a mechanic that will essentially “Count down” till adventurers come with Reputation reducing the count down. So the more they make the world aware of their presence, the more adventurers will show up… that brings in countermeasures and all other kinds of choices – that’s for later.

What they also want is to incorporate tracking options into the game – so using MapTool we’ll start tracking inventory and I need to get off my lazy ass and start making tokens, objects, room textures and traps – plus some sort of inventory tracking system that can be used in game.



As always thanks for reading!