[Donjon] The Cellars of Zenopus (prep)

[Eric Minton]

After reading epweissengruber's post about running The Slave Pits of the Under-City with Donjon, I reckoned that this would be a great use for my old D&D modules.  I'm planning to use the dungeon in the back of the old D&D Blue Book boxed set to introduce my players to Donjon.  It's a pretty straightforward conversion, knocked out in half an hour.  Naturally, there's no map; I'll just let the players meander around as they see fit.  I figure that they can get through half a dozen encounters or so in one night's play, and I can either wrap it up in one session or let it run for two sessions, depending on how my players want to pace things.

We've postponed the game twice now, but we're scheduled to game tomorrow, and the third time's the charm, right?  I'll post with the results later in the week.

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Donjon Scenario 0: The Cellars of Zenopus

The sorcerer Zenopus came to Portown one hundred years ago.  He raised his tower in the hills just outside of town, between the sea cliffs and the graveyard, where he could perform his thaumaturgic experiments in privacy.  But his research ended suddenly one night when green fire engulfed the tower, leaving it in ruins.

After years of hauntings, of strange lights and howls wafting out across the city walls, the town council had the tower razed.  But adventurers still come to root through the tower's cellars, where Zenopus is said to have explored the ancient pre-human city upon whose ruins Portown was built.  A few have emerged with riches, but most return empty-handed, if they return at all.


The Town: Portown

Portown sits at a junction of caravan routes from the South and the shipping lanes of the Northern Sea.  It has grown much of late, but remains a small city.  Adventurers in town frequent the Green Dragon Inn for its cheap beer and preponderance of cheerful barroom brawls.

Weapons and Armor: 3 (Markup 3) Decent weapons and armor may be found here.

Provisions: 7 (Markup 2) As a nexus of trade and shipping, Portown has a wide range of adventuring goods at decent prices.

Hospitality: 6 (Markup 4) A wide range of inns and hostels cater to the merchant trade.  The merchants can pay well; adventurers must spend a lot to match their rates.


Chapter 1: The cellars beneath the tower (Donjon Level 1) – Goblins, giant rats and spiders, smugglers, and minor undead.

Big Bad: Charson, a thaumaturgist of no small power, whose tower links to the cellars.  (Level 3)  He is guarded by Devlin, a charmed smuggler whose curiosity led him to the wizard's lair.  (Level 2)  If Charson can escape his first encounter with the party, he'll summon a couple of imps to aid him in the final battle.  (Level 1)

Enticement: There's no reward in town, but the cellars themselves contain treasure to tempt beginning adventurers.


Encounters in Chapter 1:

* A large room contains crude old furniture, an assortment of useless junk, a large treasure chest, and half a dozen goblins.  Opening the chest requires an Adroitness Test at Medium difficulty  to avoid setting off a poison gas trap.  If the trap goes off, make a 6-die Damage Test against the one who opened the chest, and a 3-die Damage Test against everyone else.  Damage taken goes to Virility and Adroitness.  Defusing the trap earns everyone 4 experience points.  The chest itself contains some paltry treasure (a Level 2 cache).

* A room contains four deep, shadowy niches.  Once the characters enter the room, four skeletons emerge from the niches and attack!

* Another room contains heaps of rubble and goblin trash.  Foot-high holes pierce the back wall, surrounded by heaps of dirt and the occasional gnawed bone.  Six giant rats lurk amid the trash; they attack once the party's back is turned, but run back to the tunnels once a couple have been killed.  Treat treasures looted from the rats as having been found in the rubble.

* One massive, vaulted chamber contains several stone sarcophagi and dozens of muddy coffins, many of which have been broken open.  More giant rat tunnels open up in the walls here.  A pair of ghouls have levered the lid off a coffin and are eating the corpse inside.

* Spider webs festoon a small room.  A giant spider crawls amid the webs, and drops onto the PCs after they enter.

* Following the sound and smell of water leads to a sea cave where smugglers have set up a base.  Four smugglers sit around drinking and playing cards.  Attempting to leave by water lead to an encounter with a giant octopus.  The smugglers' loot counts as a Level 3 treasure cache.  Also, searching the boats is a Medium Wherewithal Test; success results in finding a kidnapped young noblewoman from Portown, Lemunda the Lovely.  This earns everyone in the party 4 experience points.

* A long, low room full of alchemical equipment contains the wizard Charson and his bodyguard Devlin.  Charson hides behind a workbench as he summons monsters to defend him, then flees through a secret door.  The workroom counts as a Level 2 treasure cache.

* Charson's tower contains all manner of thaumaturgic doodads.  If Charson escaped the PCs, he will be here with his wand of petrifaction and a pair of summoned imps.  The tower counts as a Level 4 treasure cache.

[Sean]

Hi,

This was the first adventure I ran for friends, in the summer of '77 IIRC. (After the debacle of running for my parents and killing my father's character over and over.)

The stuff with Lemunda the Lovely is a great opportunity for players to riff off the situation in interesting ways. I wouldn't leave out the pirates.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

This looks like a lot of fun and excellent Donjon prep. Be sure to post about it when you play: I'm very interested.

[Eric Minton]

My players just went home after our first Donjon session.  I ran them through character creation and shopping in town, then turned them loose on the dungeon.  They managed some untrained tracking rolls, rolled over some skills that maybe really shouldn't have applied (but I decided to go easy), and used a fact to find kobolds in the dungeon, for which I had to use goblin stats.  Who can tell the difference between those humanoids, anyway?  Between late arrivals and dinner, it was midnight by the time we finished their first encounter in the cellars, so we called it a night.

I'd say the players are picking things up pretty quickly, considering that they don't have any interest in actually reading the rules.  I have to teach them everything at the table, and I'm not a good teacher -- I tend to snap at people if I don't think they're getting it -- but they're taking it with good humor.  A lot of humor; there's a whole lot of joking around the table.  We set the mood dial at "serious" to start with, but it's definitely drifted into "tongue-in-cheek."

Everyone took a magical ability.  After reading about how magic was too powerful and should be toned down, I took out Cerebrality from the spell release roll, and set the difficulty of gathering power to Easy outside of combat, but Medium in combat.  As a result, no one's spells actually went off during the big fight scene.  Admittedly I was rolling pretty well, but I think I overdid it on toning down magic.  Maybe I'll set all difficulties to Easy (barring exceptional circumstances).

After the session, they described the system as feeling clunky, but observed that this may just be a learning curve issue.  They're certainly willing to come back and try again, despite only killing one kobold, with the other three running away from the fiery fire and the shiny sword and all that stuff.  This led to several minutes of in-character banter about how "we shall never speak of this again", and of how they killed ogres and dragons...  not one lousy kobold!  Maybe the kobolds should have fought to the death...  but I'd rather have them spring an ambush later.

I think we'll need a full session to get a grasp on the effectiveness of declaring facts and narration.  (It took a while to get the hang of the ebb and flow of the system; I'd win a Test and declare facts *and* narrate, before I remembered to turn narration over to the player.)  There wasn't enough time for me to show off the feedback between their actions and the dungeon.  For instance, the arcane trickster made a Tracking roll upon entering the dungeon, and when I introduced tracks as a fact, she said they were the tracks of a limping human.  So I now have to introduce that limping human -- probably by giving the Big Bad a limp.

Sorry for the rambling tone of this write-up, but I'm exhausted.  More later.

- Eric

[Eric Minton]

We had three players, all of whom have significant experience with D&D and with various White Wolf Storyteller games.  Given Donjon's nostalgic take on old-school D&D, here's what I know of their dungeon crawling background:

* Conn (my boyfriend of 5 years) played Basic D&D and 1st Edition AD&D way back in the day.  He has some gamer trauma regarding character death stemming from some bad D&D experiences.  He likes to take several sessions to "get into" his character.  (Both he and Morgan are big into immersion.)
* Morgan has only played 2nd Edition AD&D.  The GM tended toward political games rather than dungeon crawls, and loved employing Force to back his players into making "lesser of two evils" choices.  All three players have played under this GM in the past few years; as a result, all three try to cover every possible contingency when making plans because they expect to be screwed at every opportunity.
* I'm not sure about Heath; I know he's played 2nd Edition D&D under the aforementioned GM, and I know he has some earlier D&D experience, but I'm not clear on the details.

After a lot of non-game chatter and goofing around, they settled down to character creation, though the goofing around continued to a lesser extent throughout the evening.  Heath quickly chose a Silver-Tongued Imp, Zarmin, with conjuring magic and archery; Morgan devised an Arcane Trickster, Tanith, with social and dungeoneering skills, but no combat abilities other than illusion magic; and after pondering for several minutes, Conn created a Shadow Ninja, Scalamandre, with lots of combat abilities.

I may have been a bit too lax in defining Abilities, as they were struggling with categorization and seemed a bit annoyed at how few things their characters were good at.  So the Arcane Trickster wound up with "Trap Mastery" as a Main Ability, which is probably as broad as "Combat", and the Shadow Ninja has the magic word "Enhance" (too broad?), along with a Supporting Ability, Use Poison, that's probably broad enough to be a Main Ability -- assuming he ever uses it.

To speed play, I made everyone calculate their combat scores and scribble them into the margin on their character sheets.  I know my group, and search time would take forever otherwise; they'd have to keep on recalculating Attack, Damage, Dodge and Resist scores on every action.  (It would slow me down too; I made sure to calculate scores for the kobolds at the start of combat and write those down, too.)  They noted that the character sheet could be improved with spaces for those things...  and that it should note the Main Ability separately from Supporting Abilities...  and there should be a space to mark down Experience Points.  In fact, there was quite a bit of ragging on the character sheet.  I promised to design them a new one for next session.

The group went in for some broadly comical role-playing as soon as we got into town; when Zarmin asked if Tanith would use her Haggle With Merchants ability to help him shop for a bow, she immediately started bargaining to get a piece of his share of the entire treasure haul.  (He turned her down.)  Things got sillier when they got to the dungeon and faced the stairway leading down into darkness.  First, Zarmin decided to roll to break off a tree branch (meant to find traps, as with the ever-popular 10-ft. pole), and failed.  Then the party started failing Provisions rolls to bring out flint and steel.

Tanith: "I seem to have forgotten my flint and steel.  Could you look through your backpack?"
Zarmin: "Why would I have your flint and steel?"
Tanith: "I might have dropped it while I was going through your stuff."

Once the ninja sparked a light and they got down into the dank and smelly dungeon, Morgan wanted to look for tracks.  She was once again irritated by the fact that she would have to make a roll for an Ability she didn't have.  Taking the facts I gave her (there were tracks, and they led west through an intersection), she used narration to describe them as the tracks of a limping human...  and then led the party to the left, not following the tracks.

(I asked her today why she did that.  Her answer: "Suspense.  I figured there would be zombies or something, but that we would run into them later, and maybe in the process figure out the mystery of the place, or at least one of the mysteries.  Didn't want to just have everything be straight cause-and-effect.  And a pause gives all of us more time to think about the details of the things.")

Faced by a dungeon door warped by decades of water damage, Tanith searched for traps, then rolled her successes into prying the hinges off, using her Trap Mastery both times.  (Yep, I decided to go easy on them for a while.)  Rolling the Make Light dice on Scalamandre's torch, Conn used his successes to populate the room with kobolds and a treasure chest.  Conveniently, the first encounter on my list was a room full of goblins and a treasure chest.  Close enough!  The evening's only fight broke out.

And...  well, everyone tried to cast spells, and I managed to roll a LOT of 20s against their Gather Magic Power rolls.  And the kobolds had some pretty high Attack and Dodge scores.  Combined with their low Damage ratings, the resulting fight was a real whiff-fest, with very little actual damage dealt out.  I'm sure the party would have slaughtered the kobolds by the end of the flurry, but D&D kobolds are notoriously cowardly, and I figure they can come back and pester the party later.

Doing so poorly against opponents they perceived to be really weak demoralized the players; they complained about it in character, but it's clear to me that they were annoyed about it out of character as well.  I should probably explain to them that the kobolds were stronger, in relative terms, than D&D kobolds would be against 1st level characters.  Scalamandre's failure to loot the corpse didn't help, either.  So they were grumpy even after finding and bypassing the chest's trap, getting trap XP, and finding the treasure cache inside.  I even allowed Morgan to roll over some of Tanith's many successes on disarming the trap toward searching the cache

Fortunately, everyone managed to come up with something to search for, though the process was a bit painful.  They weren't ready for on-the-spot creativity of that nature.  Zarmin took the easy way out and dug up 3 Wealth; Tanith found a magic dagger of returning ("but you don't need to pay for ammo for missile weapons, so 'returning' isn't really meaningful, mechanically speaking") with DR 2 and +2 to attack; and Scalamandre dug up a cloak of elvenkind (+3 to hide in shadows).

We ended the session there.  Everyone expressed interest in continuing, which is a good sign, though it really doesn't mean much; our group can be rather passive-aggressive when it comes to games they don't like.  But I'm pretty sure they actually want to give it another try, despite feeling nonplussed by the system.  I'm hoping that they realize how their narrative power can be used to break out of the dungeon crawling framework.  I'm not sure how much to tell them about how far they can stretch things, though...  lots of the fun of Donjon seems to come from showing off your creativity by inventive applications of your Abilities.  Or is that just me?

Anyway, that's all for now.  Comments and questions are welcome.

- Eric

[Vaxalon]

Any middle aged gamer like me ought to recognize this adventure.  Kudos for your choice for inspiration!

[Eric Minton]

Any middle aged gamer like me ought to recognize this adventure.  Kudos for your choice for inspiration!

It's a classic.  :-)

I finally realized what I was doing wrong with combat...  I was narrating the results when a character lost an attack or damage Test!  That's so ingrained from D&D combat that no one questioned it, even after the fact.  Clinton, I'd recommend a fuller example of combat in the book; while it's implicit that the basic narration rules carry over into combat, the combat examples never actually show anyone narrating the results.

[Eric Minton]

We played the second session of our Donjon game last night.

Before the game started, I went over what we did wrong with combat, and gave the players an opportunity to change their Abilities if they wanted.  I explained that Abilities were basically the player's way of saying, "I did X, and then something cool happened!", and that their choice of Abilities determined what tools they had to affect the game environment.  Heath, who'd felt disempowered by some poor Gather Power rolls in the first session, changed his Conjuration Magic to a simple Conjuration ability.  Then we put on some techno and went straight into the game.

Play flowed much better this time around.  The players were more aggressive in using Abilities from provisions and magic to define the environment, although I had to walk them through the methodology a few times.  For example, Morgan wanted to use a mirror on a stick to look into a cavern, and I had to explain that this meant defining an Ability for the mirror-on-a-stick (e.g. "Look Around Corners 2").

There was also a lot of silliness and giggling.  Some of this came from Heath's character's magic; he'd designed the character as a wild mage, as in AD&D or the Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Donjon was perfect for that, as we both sabotaged the effects his imp generated, as with the light spell that conjured a glowing fairy dressed only in suds and a bath towel.  And then he threw it at a ghoul, which gnawed on its entrails, and then his attempts to heal it backfired, and then it exploded...  Well, things got pretty silly.

More goofiness came from the group's attempts to push the limits of what they could accomplish through facts and narration, and my own efforts to push back.  Morgan's one fact from her use of the mirror-on-a-stick was that the cavern contained a giant gold statue.  Not entirely sure how to allow that without breaking the game, I put it on a barge with a dozen squid-headed creatures and thirty kobolds and sailed it downstream.  (In retrospect, if they *do* ever get hold of a giant gold statue, it's just a Worth 12 item; nothing to get worked up over.)  But then I realized this blocked the party off from the pirates, so after the ghoul encounter, I had the barge go back upstream...  leading my players to liken it to a Disney ride, with hilarious gestures and commentary that broke up the game for several minutes.

It's kind of fun for us to test the limits of the system and push against each other.  Twice I used narration to take advantage of holes in the players' facts.  Once, Heath ordered his summoned fairy to attack a spectre, and after musing aloud about using his one success to ensure the fairy obeyed the order, he used the success for something else...  and was surprised when I narrated that the fairy didn't obey the order.  Shortly therafter, Conn used a single success on trying to open a sarcophagus to declare that it was full of gold...  and I narrated that it was indeed full of gold, but that he couldn't know that because he was unable to open it!  Happily, the players didn't seem frustrated at all at being thwarted in their efforts, so things seem to be working as intended.

It's also worth noting that the players seem to be entertained by sabotaging themselves!  Aside from Heath's uses of wild magic to do silly and unproductive stuff, Morgan used her "Appraise Magic Items" Ability to find a cursed jewel in a sarcophagus, which she then proceeded to wear, after which Conn declared that the spectre that emerged from the next sarcophagus attacked Morgan's character in an attempt to take the cursed jewel.  I have no idea as yet what's motivating this, but it seems functional -- everyone's having fun with this element of play as well.

The session ended with the party finding and deciphering the mask/sundial puzzle, and asking which way to go to find the most riches for the least risk.  (They're definitely getting into the old-school dungeon delver mindset!)  The mask's directions should lead them to the pirates and Lemunda the Lovely.  I'm very curious as to how this will turn out -- Donjon really does leave the GM wondering what will happen next!