Castle Greyhawk edition - Post'em if you got'em
>>96884768So as you may or may not already be aware, I've taken the big bite and am running Expedition to the Ruins of Castle Greyhawk with as full access as I can manage to the "Wilderness" elements of the dungeon as detailed in WGR1 Greyhawk Ruins.OP has been my biggest challenge yet and, as usual, I'm at least a week ahead of my players. They've just recovered the "Key of Magic" from Mordenkainen in the Wizards' Guildhall and will have access to The Tower of Magic (confusingly called the "Power Tower" in WGR1 and keyed P) - if they even decide to head there, at the very least they'll have an interaction with some mad Clerics here on this map in those pyramids, who will immediately take their possession of the Key as a sign from Zagig and fuck off chasing a butterfly into the Gnarley Woods (after dispersing the mist that had sealed this tower). My players may go into the main hall and descend normally but being the treasure grubbing little shits they are will probably loot the pyramids and discover a ring of teleportation that takes them down to the level ABOVE the OP map there.
>>96884800I suppose because it doesn't anticipate combat, Expedition doesn't include any map whatsoever for the Grandfather Magic's pyramids other than a vague description of them. It also says, basically, "Just let your players go straight to the Vaults of Creation or maybe stick some railroad encounters between them and it if you want, whatever.But we're gonna do it right. Either they're going to straight up delve down five floors (which they'll probably bitch out of doing if I know them) or they're going to discover that teleportation ring which will take them to this weird little receiving room (401) where, before the sealing, the Wizards down here would sell magic items - but currently don't. They can either take that spiral staircase there UP and then go AROUND and back down twice or use the fucked up teleporters there that are actually designed for sorting monsters according to their Law/Neutrality/Chaos alignments but will function the same way for my PCs and [separate teh party] as follows:Teleportal Left Ahead RightNeutrality P411 P405 P425Law P432 P430 P436Chaos P442 P447 P449 So... That'll be fun. I feel like there's some possibility they'll actually make it that far during tomorrow's session so I should probably familiarize myself with all of the above rooms. Sheesh.
>>96884832So their ultimate goal on that map there is stairway down S6, which means the closest they could get via the teleporter is P425. I'm glad I very closely re-read the description of this mechanism because it doesn't actually automatically sort by alignment, there's runes on the floor that *represent* alignment (starting with Neutrality on the left, then Law, then Chaos). Characters teleport into a void where they're presented with three mystery paths - presumably intended as Neutrality, Good and Evil to begin? I dunno if I want to try to sus out whatever shades of intention might have been there and I'll just leave that mysterious - all the monsters trapped down here are evil so that wouldn't have been much of a factor anyway. But yeah, the "right" solution is for everybody to take the Neutrality teleporter (left) and then bear right in the void - which maybe I'll imply is also Neutrality because they're flipped or something if anybody actually makes a decent roll to get a hint.Or they might take stairway S4 up immediately to picrel, I guess. Forgive the switches back and forth from transparent pngs to "netscape gray" background jpgs. I'm flirting with the file size limit on my pngs.
>>96884800OK I think it's time to post my big isometric map for reference. I just realized how this actually is supposed to work. The ring the clerics have is just a passwall spell storing ring they use to allow people to pass through the black wall sections of the pyramids (which are the only sections that aren't antimagic). Then they can use staircase S2 to descend straight to the Sanctum Arcanum >>96884893 where they would have been physically led down staircase S4 to P401 in The Vaults of Creation >>96884832 if the were "open for business" a presented in WGR1 but they're not.S4 seems to be intended as the only way to gain access to The Vaults of Creation but I see a sinkhole C1 in area 333 that's keyed to just dump out into 401 but I think I'll take mercy and have dump into the collapsed corridor outside 424, immediately outside their intended path (Staircase S6)
City maps used for a campaign I ran 2 years ago. I drew them myself.
>>96885114
>>96885121
>>96885121Is this based on Dave Arneson's Blackmoor?
>>96885150Nope. Just pulled it straight out of my head.
Cool shit, good thread.
I'm starting to realize that I'm pretty terrible at making my own dungeon maps. What are people's thought processes for building and connecting rooms? I get the idea of giving things a purpose and trying to fill it with enemies that make sense for the setting, but I'm talking things that don't often get discussed enough, like room size/floor space based on party sizes for combat encounters, how many hallways of connecting rooms are too many (and too long), and other things of that ilk. If you have traps, how spread out do you like to place them in conjunction to enemy combatants, etc? Physical griding of the map itself and less flavor or purpose.
>>96886405I'll post some more of the Castle Greyhawk "battlemaps" here in a bit. Until then, some additional info on the modification I did on >>96884768 - When I post the ones I did of the War Tower, you'll see how the full color Expedition maps overlaid nicely to begin with on top of the much more extensive but sketchier WGR1 maps... For a while. By the time it was getting to the end of that chapter the last map was significantly different and didn't really fit great, under the pretense that there had been some seismic activity related to the implied WGR1 "narrative" about a conflict between Nerull and Vaprak the trollgod. In my campaign, I'm presuming it was this conflict that weakened Nerull enough for, if the PCs don't intervene (I have a Horned Society plotline that would involve this), his secret consort Wee Jas to kill him and absorb his Death pantheon to become the Raven Queen (this is a hardcore Greyhawk plotline that is very very obscure but relates to the whole line).But anyway, in the Vaults of Creation >>96884768 the full color Expedition material clearly shows WGR1 area P515 as the entrypoint but then pretty much immediately changes everything. In the WGR1 section its just some dumb shit about verbeegs and I think norkers that I initially was just going to completely overwrite but there's a Rod of Sanctuary or whatever you call it in 521 I wanted them to be able to find so I connected that into the way I tied that into the caved in part of 512 that can be found via a submerged part of the illithid mudpool in Expedition's F10, which I had to stretch a bit in a couple places since the statue of Boccob in 518 is definitely the same as the one in F12. This causes both staircases S6 and S11 to be in completely different places but at least they *are* there so the dungeon doesn't lose any of its greater connectedness to the full WGR1
>>96886489There are really a lot of schools of thought about that which can be sorry of broken down by era and it really boils down to your players' sensibilities. One of the things I find myself saying over and over again when giving advice on DMing is "think inside the box". There's come to be so much emphasis on high-concept that the modern game has scarce practical advice relating to the actual mechanics of real play.You know what you want your dungeon to *do* but you're left almost completely in the dark about what that should actually look like. The answer is to start with your actual players, think about the kind of experiences they want to have per-session, how many total sessions their attention is going to be kept on your theme and create " boxes" that will adequately challenge them (another moving target, group to group) while also satisfying what they actually want to get from play. One you get the hang of building those boxes, start connecting them in logical but also interesting ways and that's the gist of it.
I remember overlaying it and kind of drawing a couple conclusions about how it might tie together before but now I'm getting to a point where I see that the corridor beyond F22 here >>96884768 is supposed to connect to staircase S6 which hopefully we are, together, about to discover is still available on this composited map of The Arena, level 6 (or 7 in WGR1 because it counts the ground floors as dungeon levels, which Expedition chooses to ignore) of the Tower of War.
>>96887326Damn. Almost. S6 is that staircase we can kind of see near rooms 725-727. I've added a "From F22" note for myself in Owlbear Rodeo. Actually, the corridor it's describing probably connects to what's illustrated as a collapsed corridor here, W604.Anyway, to get down to Nerul's Gate the PCs would need to make their way over to S5 on that map, which if guided (there are some enslaved Verbeegs immediately before this) could be done without entering any keyed areas other than 704 which is just some distracted orugs.
>>96886489One school of thought is just scale things realistically. Look at some actual floorplans of real locations and just follow the dimensions. Human foot speed hasn't changed a huge deal in the last millenia so areas scaled to walking aren't going to differ too much, and if you're copying locations from a roughly analogous time period (ex. old castles) the builders often were restricted by certain construction methods and considerations.The other school of thought is from a gameplay perspective: If you're doing an old-school approach where you're doing random encounters every X minutes you may want to consider scaling your dungeons around that consideration instead. Either way, it can help to try and get a feel for what 30' actually looks like as well - or whatever foot speed you're using if not D&D defaults (use a local walkable area as a reference and see how far that is).
>>96887680It's interesting how when I really put it through the wringer, we CAN see how the writers of Expedition included just enough connecting material to prove that they really were working right with WGR1 even if they necessarily handwaved big parts of it and included some quantum ogre maps to use as necessary in place of this material.So anyway, yeah after coming into S604 on that map, the PCs should go down staircase S6 (which I'm seeing actually takes them in the opposite direction I labeled my Owlbear Rodeo map so I just changed that) to >>96887326 where, in a perfect world, they will just stick to the corridors past some ogres in 702 and I guess some regular ogres in 704, through a secret door into the 725-727 area where there are some Nerull clerics or something and down S6 onto picrel here - where they'll need to progress through W830 and a secret door into 831 while ignoring the more obvious doors. They're really really going to need a guide for this part. Then around the corner to staircase S8, an unnecessarily wide one...
>>96887786So they're supposed to go down S8 onto this map which is actually a very obvious long, long downward sloping corridor which leads to a couple spiral staircases S9 that empty out into...
>>96887812Nerull's Gate! There will definitely be some interesting things that happen here, even more so if they manage to pick up the Nerull's Vengeance sidequest, especially if they've picked it up from (Robilar/Bilarro, currently captive in the Godtrap) Warduke's replacement Hierarch of the Horned Society. That's about as far as they might EVER go so I won't invest my time in getting any further ahead of them than this for now.
>>96887839Here's how it looked before it got all fucked up
Okay so I guess this is where I bring myself back around to refreshing the immediate plot they may interact with tomorrow. So... sheesh... broad strokes. So canonically Robilar has been replaced at some point in history by Bilarro from Uerth and it was Bilarro that betrayed the Circle of Eight in Rary the Traitor (although those events were not necessary in my current campaign due to player action) - but in my campaign, Bilarro has also been acting as Hierarch of the Horned Society as "Warduke" and that's not only how he originally encountered my players, but also who he was acting as when he freed Zuggtmoy from the Temple of Elemental Evil (since they flaked on completing it) and turned out to interact surprisingly well with Expedition. There's a character at the Green Dragon who is almost certainly inspired by if not a direct stand in for Kelek (from the LJN toyline and also appearing in the 83 cartoon series) who is a party member with Warduke. Additionally(!) the River of Blood murders in the City of Greyhawk were done by this guy Bluto San Spite who canon is pretty hazy on exactly how he got away. Supposedly Robilar captured him inititally - or maybe he turned himself in then somehow escaped, maybe with Robilar's help? Anyway, that dude has very canonically been in White Plume Mountain so Robilar/Warduke(Bilarro) asked my players to basically go silence San Spite, in a suspicious way that made them want to actually interview him - but as usual they ended up more distracted trying to retrieve the treasures so I dispatched a rival adventuring party to wrap it up offscreen.So the other party just took San Spite's head without my players ever interacting with him while he was alive (they fought his headless dulahan last week) as well as taking one of the three artifacts, Whelm. Whelm is a trident and the leader of that party is this, like, shady quasi gladiator guy in this seedy place called The Pit so I visualized him like a classic roman net gladiator.
>>96887944Excuse the AI slop, we're gonna be looking at a few of these as I go over these plot points. Anyway that dude's name is Pietain Morvanis and he was the manager of The Pit (he had to convert to worship of a water diety to attune to Whelm, which I decided is going to be Dagon and I have this whole Shadow Over Innsmouth thing they can follow him into if they want) So the reason I selected him and this other employee of The Pit, a eunuch (explicitly a eunuch) pro-wrestler type of "gladiator" named Rashif Iqbal who I guess will now be the leader of that "rival party" because The Pit is owned by picrel, this guy named Andrade Mirrius, who is one of the major antagonists of the City of Greyhawk boxed set, explicitly a member (we're promoting him to Heirarch) of the Horned Society (which is why he also sent a party to silence San Spite about his failed River of Blood ritual to gain entrance to the Society) - he also happens to be the leader of The Cult of the Shriven Sickle which is, *fanfare* the largest cult of Nerull in the City of Greyhawk - so we have a closed circle there that connects the Horned Society to the Nerull's Vengeance subquest in Expedition as a move against Iuz who initiated the events of Expedition as well as being canonically going to wipe out the Horned Society Hierarchs in the near future at the Blood Moon Festival if the PCs don't intervene in some way... Which I would love for them to do.
>>96887998So, back to old dead and headless Bluto San Spite, who's body the Iuz cult was in possession of I guess just for name dropping reasons in Expedition - but makes good sense that they had retrieved in hopes of getting some information out of it about possible opposition to Iuz's plans by the Horned Society who were one step ahead and had his literal head to prevent Speak With Dead from working so last week the PCs wrapped up by fighting his Dulahan.But before that, they encountered his son who had come to the city (COR7-08 Sins of the Father) to lay claim to his Bluto's modest estate (that the PCs were already familiar with from doing the Living Greyhawk adventure COR1-03 when they first got to the city). So there are actually some factions in the city who want to hold San Spite's son (his name's Sir Hendry) liable for his father's crimes and he's requested a trial by a jury of the leaders of the good aligned churches. In COR7-08 the PCs were asked to act as Hendry's representative to collect his character witnesses from around the area but they passed on doing that so tomorrow I'll be introducing them to picrel, noir-style lady investigator Danica Vranic who Hendry has hired to do that job and who in the future will be hired by Andrade to find Pietan and will get captured in Innsmouth and send the PCs a letter that will also maybe take them in that direction.The module I'll using is a very 5e adaptation of Innsmouth that actually has a section at the beginning explaining that changes have been made to the story to be more inclusive and that the Deep Ones are actually not evil, they're totally nuanced and shit with real relatable motivations.But of course I'm throwing that right the fuck out the window since they're going to be literal thralls of 1eFF Dagon and I'm planning to actually do more of a Alan Moore's Neonomicon thing with this girl if the players ever take it that way - although it'll totally happen way offscreen if they don't do anything
So on the topic of Dagon, this is also going to help me hopefully close a circle on this other plot thread I have where Lareth The Beautiful, this pretty iconic NPC who's the first miniboss of Gary's Temple of Elemental Evil, the only one we meet in the T1 standalone Village of Hommlet.THIS fuckin guy. Let me tell ya. So he starts out as "Lolth's most beloved" which is pretty crazy right from the jump not to be a Drow - but he's on his way to join the Temple of Elemental Evil and is in fact somewhat affiliated with these Drow, clan Eilserves who are trying to work with the Elder Elemental God and opposing Lolth - my PCs dealt a pretty harsh blow to Lolth as well, stealing her Spidership and delivering it to none other than Rary (which is why he has no need to turn Traitor).So anyway, Lareth never actually makes it to his appointment to join the Temple anyway because PCs always defeat him - it's pretty much a given as part of the prologue - but they NEVER FUCKING KILL HIM. It's supposed to be like that and it's even written that there'll be a nasty price on whoever's head does kill him but every single time I've run T1 (which is like half a dozen) they ALWAYS let him talk them into taking him prisoner, from which he's more or less immediately rescued by some faction or other who just love him so damn much. This time around it was by giants who the players believed were the same ones harassing the Kron Hill gnomes but were actually servants of Imix.So anyway, once Warduke(Robilar) freed Zuggtmoy from the Temple of Elemental Evil it was revealed to have been a sham not actually serving Elemental Evil so Lareth here has, since then, been traveling around trying to bring the Princes to Oerth and my PCs saw him succeed with Olhydra in VTF4-03 Whirlpool of Madness when they were hanging out in Dyvers. There's a whole Velverdyva Trade Route Elemental Evil thread that can be followed but they split off from that with just Lareth and Olhydra.
>>96888170So I want to give Lareth a chance of figuring out that the Elder Elemental Eye isn't what it claims to be. He and Olhydra are going to have some kind of quasi-romantic worship/relationship and it's likely that he's going to be interested in Whelm for that reason. I want Tharizdun to be as Lovecraftian as possible so bringing Lareth and Olhydra into direct contact with Deep Ones and Dagon is something I would very much like to explore.Of course my players rarely take those more arcane directions. I'll be lucky if they even take any interest in Nerull and the Horned Society.Someday MAYBE they'll learn how Greyhawk is just so chock full of villains that all work AGAINST EACH OTHER that the Circle of Eight is actually right with their militant neutrality. Until they learn to balance the big bads there will always be a new one ready to fill the vacuum of whichever one they defeat.They literally just met Mordenkainen last session but he was mostly concerned about making them understand what had happened to the real Robilar. Maybe if they succeed at bringing him back to Oerth Mordy will show them how to play the game.
>>96885114>>96885121>>96885136Quick question about the map conventions you've got here because I'm unused to some of them and don't draw city maps as much as I'd like. Am I right that the parallel black lines that go around in curves depict hillsides and the squared lines are cliffsides? Other than that, what's the difference between walls and towers in black as opposed to in white in >>96885114
>>96889037>what's the difference between walls and towers in black as opposed to in white inBloodcliff was the first city map and it had a couple of inconsistent stuff that I decided not to do later. Same for the squigly-square wall (which I used for incomplete/ruined wall later. Doomwatch and Blackmoore were made much later in campaign when I realized some stuff need better representation and both were used for actual sieges ingame so they were much readable for players. As for other questions - have picrel.
>>96884768Just some dungeon i did in a couple of evenings.I have yet to play it, tho.Really should consider making the maze suck less, probably make it a part of a bigger puzzle.
>>96884800So I just came across picrel and rotated it to align with owlbear grids. It's a more polished version of >>96884800 which will help me to confuse my players into thinking that all of the ground floor of the Tower of Magic may be part of the curated Expedition experience rather than literally just an unmapped one-page RP interaction with some insane priests.From the group text, I'm going to be pretty light on my RP players today and the combat players will almost certainly go looking for a fight at this newly open dungeon.
>>96890725kino
>>96884768Kill yourself namefag>>96885114>>96885121>>96885136>>96889566These are great, thanks for posting Anon! What's the name of the cursive font used to label "Blackwood" on two of the maps?
Map of a dragon's underground temple lair from when I was 15. My dad's characters showed up to an island, to learn there was a prophecy of someone with his bard's name being the one to slay a dragon. So they were railroaded into doing it, with a few imprisoned NPCs were also part of the prophecy. They got a pretty good reward out of it. Kinda weird what passed for an adventure for me back then. And a map.
>>96896239What are you talking about? This is a great map. You've even got it on quadrille gridded paper lol. All of my maps I've ever actually drawn out myself look just like this. Generally shittier.
>>96895195The players actually wrapped up yesterday's session on that map and upon close play it had the usual fuckups - notably there were supposed to be bookshelves in the right pyramid that got converted to just empty walled in gaps - which fortunately worked into the difference between it being manned by money grubbing priests of Boccob in WGR1 to it being manned by insane priests of Zagyg in Expedition (I didn't have to come up with weird shit to have on the shelves). That's the kind of thing you run into when you use these kind of maps though.
>>96896148>What's the name of the cursive font used to label "Blackwood" on two of the maps?The initial is - RuritaniaThe rest is - Old english text MTBoth found on dafont.comHave a whole campaign map while you're at it
>>96899463fuck, I'm retarded. Cursive font for woods is JellykaSaint AndrewsQueen
>>96897338It's just kinda crooked. And crude. I did avoid relying on a key back then, so I wrote details in the margins with arrows pointing to where it was. I think it works decently. Pic relayed is a more recent map of mine. Now I just number the rooms and have a key on a separate page. Also that map is for an ACKS game but for Pathfinder or 5e I actually printed out special graph paper from incompetech website that was the exact dimensions of my battle mat so I can make each dungeon or section of dungeon fit perfectly to that. Which is kinda autistic but if you use a battlemat enough you understand how annoying it is to run out of space just to draw one last room. Also restrictions breed creativity.
>>96899463>>96899478Thanks!>>96897360Neck yourself, namefag!
>>96889566looks like a penis
>>96886489Read Jaquaysing the dungeon and check out some NuSR content
