What I was thinking about this morning was one of the fundamental flaws in this type of adventure. It's something that doesn't seem to be discussed by The Great RPG Thinkers, but it's a crucial omission that's common to funhouse dungeons like White Plume Mountain. What do all these critters eat?
"But Matt," you may say, "a wizard did it! The place is sustained by magic! Please suspend your disbelief at the door as you descend into a labyrinth of subconscious terror and..." by now I'm already rapping on the table to interrupt you.
We can debate the relative merits of "a wizard did it" another day. That ain't the problem here. Ditto for the fatal blow that this kind of dungeon strikes against one's sense of verisimilitude. The problem is that if the monsters don't have a food source, I can't exploit it. By detaching White Plume Mountain's inhabitants from such day-to-day concerns as what they eat and where they sleep and how they spend their time when they aren't waiting for some moron to wander into the mountain, the module deprives me of several promising lines of attack.
Anyone who's played Cyberpunk or Shadowrun knows that, in order to get into The Secure Location, you dress as a delivery guy. Who's the delivery guy for White Plume Mountain? Beating him up and taking his place would be an awesome adventure. I'm sure a competent GM could work that out on the fly. But a competent module-writer could also have included a few sentences about it, saving us some trouble when our players have a brilliant idea like that, and also getting paid more on a per-word basis. Exploiting the real-world-ish behaviors of fantastic critters is a promising line of thought.
EDIT: I know some people who worked with White Plume Mountain's author, Lawrence Schick. He is, in fact, a very competent designer and writer. But I still think the module needs some background logistical stuff. Maybe 250 words of it; at 2 cents/word, that's another $5 for Lawrence right there.
When I was teaching literature, my definition of "genre" (as opposed to "setting" or "themes") is "a collection of the expectations the world has for what sorts of problems crop up, and how they get resolved." Excessive examples provided upon request.
ReplyDeleteThe "delivery guy" schtick is in the secret agent genre. And Cyberpunk characters work well in that genre. "White Plume Mountain" is in a different type of story all together. You don't need to worry about sneaking into the complex undetected, any more than you need to worry about your best friend / colleague on the right betraying your secret admiration for the elf archer and the ramifications for your friendship.
When I was teaching literature, my definition of "genre" (as opposed to "setting" or "themes") is "a collection of the expectations the world has for what sorts of problems crop up, and how they get resolved." Excessive examples provided upon request.
ReplyDeleteThe "delivery guy" schtick is in the secret agent genre. And Cyberpunk characters work well in that genre. "White Plume Mountain" is in a different type of story all together. You don't need to worry about sneaking into the complex undetected, any more than you need to worry about your best friend / colleague on the right betraying your secret admiration for the elf archer and the ramifications for your friendship.
When I run a game, or play in one, I don't necessarily *want* to be tied to a particular genre/style/theme/what-have-you. Nor do all players and GMs have the same understanding of what a given genre/whatever will involve. In my experience, a large percentage of players (myself included) look at an RPG situation as a set of problems to be solved. The more information that's available to solve various kinds of problems, the happier I am. That could be why superhero games are my favorite form -- a wider set of styles, tones, and subjects are assumed.
DeleteI like to add food sources to my dungeons! You can probably do it to WPM without too much trouble. Here goes:
ReplyDeletePlants: Add dirt to room descriptions. Growing from mounds and patches of decomposed matter are grasses and shrubs. You should add air vents to the outside for these rooms too. To avoid making it too easy to access the dungeon through these air vents, add rusting grilles and bars along the way and have the path be very long so duration of Diminution and Gaseous Form potions will run out before getting to the end.
You can add mosses to more places because people aren't as picky about whether they have enough sunlight.
Farther down the ladder, add fungus and mold to basically everywhere.
Water: Stick occasional pools, trickles from the wall into a crevasse in the pavement, and one or two working fountains. Monster wandering encounters should be more common nearby.
Bugs: Add lots of little bugs eating things. Your random encounter table should include finding carrion, which may have treasure in / under it (to encourage search) and may carry terrible things (disease, giant centipede, rot grubs) (to discourage search).
Vermin: Add encounters with rats, owls, whatever kind of vermin you want to include. Don't just put them in encounters, though, add them to room descriptions that you give the same way you add plants. This puts them in the position of "not that important" to players, which is great when you occasionally sneak in an Imp polymorphed into snake-form.
Animals from Outside: Occasionally the animals from outside should wander into the upper levels, so add them to the encounter lists. This is great because they seem so helpless and out of place, you feel sorry for this elk that wandered into a spear trap or whatever.
Many monsters don't need to eat, or otherwise subsist on stuff that doesn't matter like lichen.
Finally, monsters can eat each other. Where do monsters go when they die? Into the hungry mouths of other monsters! This is why the dungeon is at an equilibrium.
You can also describe the dungeon as having been attacked by lots of adventurers up until a year ago. This lowers the population of adult monsters during the assault, but the young have SO MUCH FOOD between the dead adventurers and dead monsters that after a year they're up beyond the normal carrying capacity of the dungeon. If the PCs were to wait at the entrance for another year or two, half the dungeon population would die off from lack of food. So why not wait? Maybe they need something inside right now, not two years from now. Or maybe there are now competing adventurers going in too and they don't want to miss out. Or maybe the game gives lots of XP for monster killing and the current overpopulation is a good thing.
I am in awe, and somewhat in terror, of your careful analysis.
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