Tuesday, November 24, 2020

The Perfect Dungeon

For various reasons, we've lacked quorum (defined as "half the total players plus one," which is five in this case) in my weekly House of Worms campaign. That's fairly unusual, but Real Life™ has intruded on everyone during 2020, so we do our best to roll with the punches. One of the joys of a long campaign like this one is that it has years of momentum behind it; there is no danger that, even if we somehow didn't meet for more than a month, the campaign would fall into desuetude. 

Those of us who have been available have used our regular meeting time simply to socialize, talking about matters of interest to us all. Though not limited to gaming, that's naturally a common topic, particularly our memories of games past. During one such chat, the Moathouse from Gary Gygax's The Village of Hommlet came up, where it was generally agreed that it's a truly great low-level dungeon. One of my players is Dyson Logos, who plays Grujúng hiZnáyu, a mighty warrior who enjoys direct solutions to problems, which sometimes means Grujúng is often left out of conversations among his more nuanced clan mates. Anyway, Dyson put forward the notion that the Moathouse is near perfect, for a variety of reasons, and I am inclined to agree with him, as I said on this blog some time ago:

Then there's the moathouse, which has everything I crave from a low-level old school dungeon: a plausble backstory, lots of vermin, and several encounters that might, if the PCs are foolhardy, lead to deaths. To my mind, the moathouse ruins provide a superb template which other referees might use in creating their own starting dungeons. It's a great example of Gygaxian naturalism in action, which is itself a reminder that, while the campaign may be set in a fantasy world, that doesn't mean the world exists solely to fulfill the players' fantasies. There are many encounters – such as the giant crayfish – that will kill low-level PCs if they are stupid enough to charge in until they are ready to do so. I like that a lot and it's something that D&D has slowly lost over the years, much to my disappointment.

I don't think I'd change a word of what I wrote above. If anything, I'd probably wax even more lyrical about the things I adore in the dungeon – and by "dungeon," I also mean the upper level on the surface as well. In fact, that upper level is just as important to the feel of the place as the dungeon proper. The foes on the surface consist of dangerous but mundane creatures, like giant frogs, snakes, spiders, and rats. There are also lots of brigands – underutilized opponents in my opinion. There's an "extraordinary ordinary" vibe to the upper levels that, I now realize, has probably influenced my conception of Urheim's own surface ruins more than I had realized. They're just great in my opinion, striking the perfect balance between being too mundane and too unnatural. I prefer my adventure locales to start out relatively "normal" and slowly build toward weirdness. That's why I like lots of empty rooms filled with seemingly random and inexplicable debris: they keep things understated and allow the tension to build, since the characters and, by extension, their players start to feel lulled into false sense of security.

The lower levels are just as good, with a solid selection of monsters, ranging from various Chaotic humanoids (bugbears, gnolls, ogres) to weak undead and soldiers in the employ of Lareth the Beautiful, "the dark hope of chaotic evil," as Gygax so memorably calls him. Say what you will about Gary but he certainly knew how to turn a phrase. I'd wager that no module written since first edition AD&D has ever had a single line of text worthy of memory, let alone quotation. All in all, it's a perfect package worthy of continued study and emulation. 

13 comments:

  1. T1 is arguably one of the best modules TSR ever produced. The flexibility and depth of background story have been the foundation of many campaigns that I have run over the years.

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    1. Obviously, I agree: it's practically flawless in my view.

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  2. I also agree. we had t1 and used it for everything, the town was perfect for a town, so we ran so many adventures off of it. (now, older, I wish I had CSotIO for a city as well.

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  3. Its perfection was broken when 3.0 had us revisit the location in their return to the temple of elemental evil. The added locations did not build on the base location in anyway.
    Its a good first dungeon for players as well, lets them get there feet wet and learn the basic's of the game itself.

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    1. The 3e "Return" module is a travesty.

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    2. didn't it make the list of top 30 adventures all time?

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    3. Yes, the "Return" module did, though I have no idea why. Organization-wise, it's arguably superior to its predecessor (which is a hot mess), but it does such violence to the overall set-up of both the Temple and Hommlet that it can't really be called much of an improvement. Its inclusion in the list is almost inexplicable.

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  4. I love the way in the module it's written out on the map things like 'farmer', 'cabinet maker', etc. Also, that drawing in the beginning of coming into the village, from a walking person's point-of-view is so entrancing. Of course you know there's danger, but, as you say, the tension builds....

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  5. Many things to love about this module, including some awesome D.A.T art, but the one that stood out to me as a middle-school kid was the sheer weirdness (In a cool, late-night B-movie way) of one of the major encounters being a giant crawdad...

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  6. I've had so much fun running it. Great memories include the green slime near the stairs causing permanent disfigurement, and a campy, debauched Lareth killing the party's dog. "Bad dog!"

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  7. Hey, I realize I may have missed my window to ask this, but supposedly Living Greyhawk revisited Hommlet and the temple, twice. Anyone know what session modules did it?

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  8. I like the moathouse ruins and basement (though there's a minor mapping error in the latter, assuming its footprint is supposed to match the level above) but am less fond of the "secret" area - not the contents (I like that the humanoids are rivals and the gnolls can potentially be turned) but the map. It neither makes sense in a "why would somebody have built this" sense nor is it "weird" enough to fall into the dreamworld/funhouse/mythic-underworld realm. Instead it dwells in that awkward in-between "it's this way because of its contents" zone that is my least favorite kind of dungeon design. I like the crypts and the cistern (though it seems awfully remote if it was actually used by the moathouse inhabitants), but don't like the setup of Lareth's rooms - that straight line of rooms lends itself to a very difficult combat for low-level characters but not much else. Lareth is (IMO) too good a character to be wasted on a combat encounter, and deserves to be a recurring villain. I feel he should be more proactive with more schemes and attempts to recruit new followers to the Temple (and/or maneuver himself to become the boss of the Temple) rather than just murdering merchants to steal their goods and then sitting around in a tunnel waiting for heroes to come kill him. I know that DMs can expand Lareth's role if they want, and Gary probably assumed they woiuld, but as-written all of that has to be inferred and I know that when I ran this module (multiple times) as a kid it always played out that the party's first encounter with Lareth was also their last - they either stumble into his lair (or are maybe led to it by the gnolls) and there's a big fight and at the end of it Lareth is dead and they only learn who he was and what he was up to after the fact. If I ever play through this again I'm going to make more use of him earlier to try to avoid that outcome (to make it so when the PCs do finally discover his hideout they'll know who he is and understand the significance of it), and while the module is open-ended enough that it allows that I'd like it better if it had also done more to support and encourage it - if Gary had included a page or two of notes about how to actually use the NPCs and how the action of the module can and should play out, rather than requiring the DM to read between the lines in order to connect all the dots (which I'm perfectly capable of now, but wasn't so much when I was 11 years old...).

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    1. (when reading the above comment, please mentally insert appropriate paragraph breaks...)

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