What fascinates me as someone running this in parallel is how converting the material to the 3e clone Fantasy Craft (which is extra homework) avoids most of the gameplay problems you encountered. It doesn't solve a lot of design issues or anything that is purely Barton's own creation, but the stuff where Barton's ideas run up against the game systems are problems I largely did not encounter, largely because Fantasy Craft redesigned those systems to solve adjacent problems that cropped up in 3e play. A few of those design changes even enable Barton's ideas rather than conflict with them.
- There are systems that restrict how much loot the characters can retain. Players can only save a percentage of their monetary wealth dictate and can only safely retain a certain number of special rewards (magic items, contacts, real estate, etc., collectively called "Prizes"). Money beyond their saving percentage is spent off-screen between delves as mercenaries have done since the dawn of time, and Prizes over the limit are lost at dramatically inopportune moments. Both the savings limit and Prize limit can be increased by spending character resources gained while leveling up. The fact that real estate is part of this system, real estate provides defined mechanical benefits, and it ties in with the Reputation system means the whole Wardens thing is actually playable as a mechanic, and some character options make interacting with it quite valuable.
- Magic items are designed entirely differently. The critical one here is spell-like effects are limited to a certain number of used per scene (even if that duration is nebulous), so while magic items do not "wear out", you also don't get permanent superpowers. The conversion isn't perfect, and there are some effects that are not covered by FC's table of magic item effects, so some of the bigger ticket items the GM is just required to figure it out.
- Items in general are different, so an easily accessible suit of enchanted plate mail is powerful, but it does not render the equipped PC practically invulnerable.
- There are skill usages for appraisal, haggling, identification, research, etc. There are classes that can be good at or even specialize in these if the players so choose. Books and such become bonuses on relevant checks. The Library of Thoth applies the bonus of a library on such checks, and when Birdie the alchemist/hobbyist archaeologist hauled all the tomes from the Secret Library back to town to read them, I allowed her to take Study: Lost Secrets of the Cult of Thoth as her new Interest when leveled up. Studies provide small bonuses on relevant skills checks, your overall bonus on Knowledge checks, and award extra information on Knowledge checks in the relevant field.
- There is a system for crafting, which includes alchemy. It is relatively straightforward (if badly worded) but is a downtime activity for PCs requiring a minimum of 1 day and as much as several months for complex or large-volume projects. Characters can specialize in it if they so choose, and in fact there is one class dedicated to being a skill specialist that has a lot of options for being a crafting specialist and there is an alchemist advanced class a PC can unlock at 5th level. This also explicitly allows for things like repairing all the statues and broken mechanisms and whatnot for characters inclined in those directions.
- NPCs have to be totally redesigned and lack rolled health, so Barton's terrible habits there are completely obviated. Standard enemies make death saves every time they take damage and unique enemies use the same two-tier health system as PCs. A strict conversion of the statblocks to FC has left the enemies feeling a little undertuned, only one PC has come close to taking serious damage, but my players are also very careful about conflict. Mage NPCs still have the "list of spells" problem, but the list is generally shorter because spellcasting as a system works differently so I'm picking spells a lot more judiciously and some NPCs end up with other abilities instead of spells.
- Secret GM-side checks to notice things are done with the Notice skill. Player-initiated checks to look for things are done with the Search skill. In both cases, a single roll is made either using the triggering player's skill bonus (if alone) or by the player with the highest/lowest bonus (if as a group, highest if success will benefit everyone, lowest if failure would impede everyone). This makes it relatively streamlined to search whole rooms or hallways with a single roll, although it does require pre-calculated square footage to determine how many turns it takes to resolve. Further for player-initiated checks, players can retry, but doing so cumulatively increases their critical failure range with each retry on top of the additional time investment, so there are mounting risks with metaphorically pulling the lever on the slot machine over and over.
Obviously this isn't everything, some problems like random encounters and potions require manual intervention and lots of homework (it took me all my free time for a week to prepare level 2 when the players blithely teleported themselves there, after spending the previous week prepping the transition area of level 3 between the precincts of Thoth and the beastman stronghold), but Fantasy Craft handles a lot of the regular procedural stuff surprisingly well and in ways that provide players meaningful mechanical choices.
Would I recommend it? I don't know. I recommend Fantasy Craft in general as a better alternative for 3e/Pathfinder style play, but converting a 1e/OSRIC/homebrew megadungeon that's already a hot mess is a lot of homework. However, if you're already doing the homework and rewriting stuff to make it work anyway, converting it to a one-book system that's surprisingly accommodating hasn't made it any harder to run. Just wish Barton had put in that legwork instead.
My group is still enjoying it, but I do look forward to taking a break to move on to other plans like MechWarrior Destiny, the Dark Heresy Haarlock's Legacy campaign, and some turbo nerd Robotech/Stargate crack crossover running on the Edge of the Empire rules. Wouldn't you know it, all of these are even more homework than Arden Vul! There is probably something very wrong with me.
Thanks for the writeup! At some point, I need to read Fantasy Craft if only to harvest the usable components
Going through something like this, I totally and fully understand how, after going cross-eyed trying to come up with rulings over and over for these same questions, the D&D 3e folks ended up just building a skill system to handle it
I have a lot of problems with how 3e implemented its skill system; effectively, every skill check was just Lift Gates but for something else. This meant your ability to do everything from be charming to know about plants was restricted by your class (in the form of class skills and skills points per level), and your class in D&D is your character's chosen form of doing violence, not really anything meaningful about their place in the world. Fantasy Craft doesn't get truly radical with it, but it shortens the skill list, makes Knowledge its own thing separate from skills, and character creation lets you pick some skills that are considered always class skills for you, minimum of 2 sometimes more, so if you want to be a fighter with a silver tongue or who knows how to provide medical care, you don't have to fight the skill system to make that work. In general, Fantasy Craft's design ethos is to put more of the tools of the game in the players' and GM's hands in a way that lets them combine things they way they want instead of silently expecting things to follow established trends.
The 2nd Printing of the core rulebook is still up on DTRPG, although the game itself has been abandoned by the publisher and they shut down the forum a few years ago, so there is very little homebrew material that survives for it. Just be warned the editing of the rulebooks is almost as bad as Barton's and I can never remember where the table of vision and hearing modifiers is or what the Acceptance value of an NPC's Disposition means. The rule that Sprawled characters have their damage resistance from worn armor -- but not natural DR! -- halved is not noted in the definition for the Sprawled condition. It's in the Armor section of the Gear chapter, specifically in the definition for the DR column of the armor table. I did not know that rule existed until about four months ago. It is a good game, but you can really tell the two leads were working on it as a side hustle.
I'm impressed. Not just that you ran this thing for so long, but that you also provided such valuable feedback for the community. If we don't have people providing that detailed critique, we don't get to see the where to the "fresh" or "rotten" (to borrow the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator system) ratings came from.
Also, I wanted to say that your blog is one of the more unique spaces in the wider OSR community. We have lots of people writing theory posts. Few people seem to want to talk about something equally valuable, which is technical writing and presentation. I'd argue that the technical writing piece is actually harder for 99% of would-be adventure writers than creating the adventure ideas and the dungeon rooms. Communicating such things in a clear and effective manner might be just as, if not more, important than the adventure concept itself.
It's easy to write something in a way you know how to run it at your table. It's a lot harder to write something in a way that anyone at any table know what the hell you're trying to say. We're luck to have you sharing your views with us. Thanks Beau.
A good comment section does not just happen because the right people wander in. It develops because you make thoughtful engagement feel normal and worthwhile.
Over time, people match that energy. They put more care into what they write because everyone else is doing the same, and because they know that kind of contribution will be noticed and appreciated. You have built the sort of space that attracts good commenters, encourages them to stay, and makes newcomers understand immediately what level of conversation is expected.
Congrats on the end! Really truly cannot imagine having read this beast front to back, let alone run the entire thing.
I'm curious to know, having now conquered Arden Vul, how your feelings towards megadungeons as a framework for adventures have changed? The three-axis "interconnected, dynamic, huge" classification system you mentioned seemed interesting, given how it can lead you to perhaps reconsider what exactly is necessary to provide a good experience in a dungeon.
Anyways, thanks for the writeups and hopefully your next games will be easier/less monotonous!
> I'm curious to know, having now conquered Arden Vul, how your feelings towards megadungeons as a framework for adventures have changed?
Yeah - originally I was very optimistic about how we'll they'd run and I was hoping that I could spend a bunch of time up-front and then my week-to-week prep would be easy. Boy was I wrong.
I do think Arden Vul could be *a lot* easier to run if we applied a herculean amount of technical writing, but that megadungeons as a structure have this cursed problem where they want to have thousands of rooms of pre-written content, but the content is deeply interconnected and so invariably whatever you wrote in the rooms is probably "out of date" after a few sessions. Whereas if you instead spread that content out over a hexcrawl the size of ireland, the stuff in the manticore lair in the west coast is probably still there even though the players torched a kobold complex on the east coast.
I think going forward, I would never run anything with over 300 (just making up a reasonable-ish number) encounter areas (and so Xyntillan, coming in at 295, is the upper bound), instead preferring to have the ability to slot in multiple locations, mix things up, etc.
A lot of the items in your verdict section are handled well by a VTT implementation. Just giving a few examples, with Fantasy Grounds (available for free and in every conceivable way better than roll20, foundry has similar tools but costs $), automation and hyperlinks solve a lot of your requests.
For the sorted monster HP issue, you create encounters and with one click add them to combat tracking. If you are using a battle map, this adds them to the map, otherwise just to the tracker. They are numbered and you have an option on your campaign setup to make it random or sequential. HP can be minimum, maximum, average, or rolled and happens instant and effortlessly when you click the one button to activate.
For stores, there are extensions which create stores players can interact with that have stock, prices, maximum buy and sell levels, etc. you create them once then let the players use it without you.
For text and what to read, there's a right click option to format text to appear in chat. So you can prep that highlighted stuff, and click it for the players as well as read it as the DM, this sets it off in a box easy to see.
The grid issue is solved if you use a gridless map.and let the VTT lay a grid onto it. Similarly they can all let you pre-place the lights so you know what's lighted and not.
What VTTs won't solve is the need to make all the rolls, or define the undefined NPCs and automate the factions, or do your restocking, etc. still, that's a lot of the lifting done. But, someone has to doo all the hard work of getting it into the VTT first. Which is where your community project comes in.
It really is a game that begs for a good Eye of the Beholder/Might and Magic style adaptation. You'd lose the freedom of the table, but having clearly defined interactions and automation of the procedural stuff would let the art really shine
With the prominence of background art in those games: Hell. Yes. Being able to *see* the halls and all their decaying grandeur is a part of what keeps me going through this and having it digitally painted, especially in vintage pixel art, would be a feast for the eyes.
Thinking about this more, you don't need a full implementation for it to help tremendously. Even a few bits up front, and then adding more as you go along would alleviate a ton of the workload.
I really appreciate your detail-oriented and analytical style of reviewing. Even if we’re not running this specific module it’s super valuable to see these principles of adventure design being applied.
I am wondering—if your conclusion is to “buy but don’t run” this megadungeon, is there a megadungeon that you do recommend for GMs that rewards the time investment with workable systems?
Aesthetically I really like Arden Vul, the faction interplay, the historical depth and interlaced puzzles making exploration really rewarding, but the scale does feel almost untenable. Have you encountered other megadungeons that lean into the dynamism/interconnectivity without striving to be quite so huge?
1) explicitly reduce the interconnectivity somehow. maybe the dungeon floors are thousands of feet apart (like Paizo's emerald spire). maybe the denizens are all under the sway of one being (delicious in dungeon). Maybe we just directly accept the problem and tell the GM to only propagate actions in 1 degree of separation.
2) explicitly reduce the pre-written content. Blades of gixa seems like it's more of a big overview / vibe than it is thousands of rooms of pre-defined content. Gary only had vague ideas for the other levels that he'd only spec out as the players were getting to them
> Have you encountered other megadungeons that lean into the dynamism/interconnectivity without striving to be quite so huge?
I've only really skimmed one other megadungeon - stonehell, and broadly was unimpressed. Thracia is on my list!
But I want all three! If I'm playing a campaign that doesn't have campaign potential ("huge") or where my actions doesn't matter ("interconnected" and "dynamic") then I quickly lose interest. I think the key is to try to balance the three instead of sacrificing one. I want the dungeon to be dynamic but it doesn't need to be that dynamic. Example:
>My party kills the halflings. The goblins expand into the halfling area. This involves the goblins spreading out... I should also update the level 3 random encounters to include goblins
Good. This is enough dynamism to keep the game live. Players did something, the obvious consequence happened. Let's continue play.
>so they’d redistribute their possessions, furniture, and treasure. This means all of the room keys in the goblin warrens are out-of-date and need to be rewritten... and then probably also adjust the frequency for encounters in the goblin warrens (since it’s now less populated).
Now you're on "optional" territory. If you feel inspired as a GM then feel free to update the goblin warrens. This borders on adventure design, which many GMs enjoy but which I know you try to avoid. If you don't want to do this, then just handwave it: The goblins are fecund and only constrained by space so it makes sense that they would quickly increase population to fill the new territory. The treasure in the new territory can be unkeyed stuff they looted there. It's believable enough.
>But now that the lizardmen are distracted, that’s the perfect opportunity for the fishmen in the drowned canyon to move in, which causes...
Now your entering crazy territory. No need to do this unless inspiration makes you want to.
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There are examples that are harder to handle: What if the players spread a deadly plague in the Arena? What if they give a faction a bunch of powerful tech? But I still think the principle above applies: Make enough change to keep the game dynamic. Don't do work you don't enjoy.
Iif you really really want to avoid this kind of GM "work" then I think you have to make a hard sacrifice in the “Interconnected, Dynamic, Huge" triangle. But I (and many other GMs) enjoy this. It's fun to think about how a Arena plague will mess up the dungeon. Sure, there's some busywork in rekeying but I rush that and it's usually good enough.
Yeah - there are goods that are of medium quality that you can have delivered soonish, and are mid-price.
I think the traditional way to have a huge campaign is to either be making the megadungeon on the fly (so now you're only writing the key based on all of the stuff that's happened once) or with a hexcrawl so that everything is less connected.
Imo if you don't want the fishmen to be responding to the lizardmen respond to the goblins responding to the halflings dying to the players, then we should pick a different structure where that isn't what would happen! There are many such structures!
>Imo if you don't want the fishmen to be responding to the lizardmen respond to the goblins responding to the halflings dying to the players
I want a medium level of dynamism. Since I can't force Barton to write a new Arden Vul with a bit more space between factions, then I need to work with what I have. If this means fudging away most second order effects then that seems like a small price to pay. Reasons I have to not worry much about the fishmen response-response:
1. I think you're doing too much rational kobold. It's not unreasonable that a good-but-not-great opportunity falls into the lap of the lizardmen or fishmen and that they just do nothing about it.
2. It's very unclear how the lizardmen will respond, and even more unclear how the fishmen will respond in turn. And it's unclear if the consequences of these responses will be good or bad for them and others. So in the cloud of all this uncertainty it makes sense to me to collapse it down to "status quo continues".
3. Will the players notice that the GM handwaved away the second order consequences of their actions? Likely not, and thus it doesn't matter. If the players find a fishman and ask him about how they responded to the lizardmen response to the goblins expansion then the fishman can just say "we noticed something was up with the lizardmen so we did a small raid but they fought us back and nothing really changed.". The illusion holds.
4. We want the players to make informed decisions. But too much butterfly effect ruins this. If my party clears the halflings and we return to find that the goblins have taken the empty territory in response, then it feels like I made a choice that had a consequence. If my party clears the halflings and we return to find that the entire dungeon has been taken over by mutant troll-hequity hybrids then it feels utterly random. It doesn't matter if the later is what logically "should" happen or if it's the outcome of my GMs BLORB simulation or whatever, it still doesn't create good play.
And again, if the fishmen response-response really inspires my GM genius then I'd go wild on it. Sure it's work but it's mostly fun work (at least for me).
> Since I can't force Barton to write a new Arden Vul with a bit more space between factions, then I need to work with what I have. If this means fudging away most second order effects then that seems like a small price to pay
Yup - this is, effectively, what we're all doing. Yet, no one *writes this down*; barton certainly doesn't explain in the module that you're not expected to simulate to this detail, the 1e DMG doesn't explain that, and the broader OSR blog space doesn't explain that. Instead, we have pieces like https://headofthegoat.itch.io/new-simulationism
Alternatively, we can just... not play Arden Vul (which is what I recommend, given the laundry list of things I think are broken). Not every product is worth playing or trying to salvage! I think a lot of folks disagree with me (especially from the reddit thread), but that's my take; I feel the same way about ~half of Gabor Lux's stuff. Or, instead of trying to publish huge megadungeons as commercial products, we can instead focus on writing structures that don't have the above problem (like 50-room dungeons or hex-crawls, or the first floor of a mega-dungeon with notes on how to expand the rest as you play)
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> 4. We want the players to make informed decisions. But too much butterfly effect ruins this.
talks about the tension between authentic simulation, narrative satisfaction, and having-a-good-game. Often times authentic simulation is *boring* and produces not-interesting-for-gaming results. Some advocates (like the acks discord) just say you're not simulating enough; I think that's largely bullshit and creates unrealistic expectations.
I want have reasonable expectations and to *write down* what those are.
I've personally run into this with stuff like war dogs in OSE. Mechanically they're strictly upside. They're bags of HP, have attacks, and can be bought cheaply. My table walked into castle xyntillan with 20 war dogs and it was a nightmare.
The downside of war dogs is probably supposed to be non-mechanical. Dogs bark at inconvenient times. They're difficult to wrangle. They pee on stuff and that smell can be tracked by a lot of predators.
If the GM doesn't simulate any of that, then war dogs will be *way* too strong for their price and you end up with degen gameplay. If they get too into the weeds about undescribed dog behavior, then players feel like they're getting punished for buying an option in the book and that doesn't feel fair either, so there's some sort of sweet spot.
The system authors and adventure authors *tend* to not write down their expectations for how this stuff works; and so stuff gets really wonky really quickly
I agree that there's missing theory for how to "fudge" (for lack of a better terms) adventures on the fly in a good way. I don't think there's a single OSR adventure of >10 pages that doesn't benefit from some tweaking during play. (And there's no OSR system that isn't broken somewhere either.)
I agree that you shouldn't run Arden Vul, but mostly because it's too big. 50 rooms is too little to support a campaign IMO, but 300 rooms is more than enough. Running a larger dungeon is mostly GM vanity. The glut of treasure and the OP magic items doesn't bother me as much: I'll fudge those away on the fly. If the unlimited invincibility seems to break the campaign, I just handwave a limit for it. If 20 war dogs becomes a staple I'll tell the players that I'm not enjoying it so please stop. I know this isn't your style.
>The system authors and adventure authors *tend* to not write down their expectations for how this stuff works; and so stuff gets really wonky really quickly
This is why we need the fudges. But an author cannot write down everything. And authors are mostly normal guys who don't think things through that much. Thus tweaking is ok. "What would this system/adventure look like if the author was enlightened and didn't make mistakes?" That's the game I'm trying to play, not the actual words on paper. And then again the game becomes arbitrary but then again that's the charm of tabletop RPGs over boardgames and CRPGS IMO.
This is a very smart response. When it comes to the Blorb principles I can totally see detail-oriented STEM-types (like me...) get sniped by the idea that respecting blorb implies simulating a whole world, down to the atom level, between sessions. But we need to rember that just like the "OSR primer" was a response to 3e, the Blorb principles are a response to scandinavian larp-type rpgs where you play by candelight and facts about the "world" are malleable. In some sense, the fundamental insight of classic d&d is that the world as a whole is the primary object of play rather than the story or the characters, and that important facts about it should be established in advance. But, as the only existing example of a Blorb milieu by the author shows, there are really not so many details required do get a good game out of the DM's efforts.
> There are dozens of treasure maps, both buried in existing hoards, found as random loot in burial niches, or clutched in the hands of adventurers. Those should probably be real handouts, but someone has to make them!
Someone did! Most of them anyway (I think). You can find them on the Arden Vul Facebook group, and on the 3d6DTL Discord server.
What fascinates me as someone running this in parallel is how converting the material to the 3e clone Fantasy Craft (which is extra homework) avoids most of the gameplay problems you encountered. It doesn't solve a lot of design issues or anything that is purely Barton's own creation, but the stuff where Barton's ideas run up against the game systems are problems I largely did not encounter, largely because Fantasy Craft redesigned those systems to solve adjacent problems that cropped up in 3e play. A few of those design changes even enable Barton's ideas rather than conflict with them.
- There are systems that restrict how much loot the characters can retain. Players can only save a percentage of their monetary wealth dictate and can only safely retain a certain number of special rewards (magic items, contacts, real estate, etc., collectively called "Prizes"). Money beyond their saving percentage is spent off-screen between delves as mercenaries have done since the dawn of time, and Prizes over the limit are lost at dramatically inopportune moments. Both the savings limit and Prize limit can be increased by spending character resources gained while leveling up. The fact that real estate is part of this system, real estate provides defined mechanical benefits, and it ties in with the Reputation system means the whole Wardens thing is actually playable as a mechanic, and some character options make interacting with it quite valuable.
- Magic items are designed entirely differently. The critical one here is spell-like effects are limited to a certain number of used per scene (even if that duration is nebulous), so while magic items do not "wear out", you also don't get permanent superpowers. The conversion isn't perfect, and there are some effects that are not covered by FC's table of magic item effects, so some of the bigger ticket items the GM is just required to figure it out.
- Items in general are different, so an easily accessible suit of enchanted plate mail is powerful, but it does not render the equipped PC practically invulnerable.
- There are skill usages for appraisal, haggling, identification, research, etc. There are classes that can be good at or even specialize in these if the players so choose. Books and such become bonuses on relevant checks. The Library of Thoth applies the bonus of a library on such checks, and when Birdie the alchemist/hobbyist archaeologist hauled all the tomes from the Secret Library back to town to read them, I allowed her to take Study: Lost Secrets of the Cult of Thoth as her new Interest when leveled up. Studies provide small bonuses on relevant skills checks, your overall bonus on Knowledge checks, and award extra information on Knowledge checks in the relevant field.
- There is a system for crafting, which includes alchemy. It is relatively straightforward (if badly worded) but is a downtime activity for PCs requiring a minimum of 1 day and as much as several months for complex or large-volume projects. Characters can specialize in it if they so choose, and in fact there is one class dedicated to being a skill specialist that has a lot of options for being a crafting specialist and there is an alchemist advanced class a PC can unlock at 5th level. This also explicitly allows for things like repairing all the statues and broken mechanisms and whatnot for characters inclined in those directions.
- NPCs have to be totally redesigned and lack rolled health, so Barton's terrible habits there are completely obviated. Standard enemies make death saves every time they take damage and unique enemies use the same two-tier health system as PCs. A strict conversion of the statblocks to FC has left the enemies feeling a little undertuned, only one PC has come close to taking serious damage, but my players are also very careful about conflict. Mage NPCs still have the "list of spells" problem, but the list is generally shorter because spellcasting as a system works differently so I'm picking spells a lot more judiciously and some NPCs end up with other abilities instead of spells.
- Secret GM-side checks to notice things are done with the Notice skill. Player-initiated checks to look for things are done with the Search skill. In both cases, a single roll is made either using the triggering player's skill bonus (if alone) or by the player with the highest/lowest bonus (if as a group, highest if success will benefit everyone, lowest if failure would impede everyone). This makes it relatively streamlined to search whole rooms or hallways with a single roll, although it does require pre-calculated square footage to determine how many turns it takes to resolve. Further for player-initiated checks, players can retry, but doing so cumulatively increases their critical failure range with each retry on top of the additional time investment, so there are mounting risks with metaphorically pulling the lever on the slot machine over and over.
Obviously this isn't everything, some problems like random encounters and potions require manual intervention and lots of homework (it took me all my free time for a week to prepare level 2 when the players blithely teleported themselves there, after spending the previous week prepping the transition area of level 3 between the precincts of Thoth and the beastman stronghold), but Fantasy Craft handles a lot of the regular procedural stuff surprisingly well and in ways that provide players meaningful mechanical choices.
Would I recommend it? I don't know. I recommend Fantasy Craft in general as a better alternative for 3e/Pathfinder style play, but converting a 1e/OSRIC/homebrew megadungeon that's already a hot mess is a lot of homework. However, if you're already doing the homework and rewriting stuff to make it work anyway, converting it to a one-book system that's surprisingly accommodating hasn't made it any harder to run. Just wish Barton had put in that legwork instead.
My group is still enjoying it, but I do look forward to taking a break to move on to other plans like MechWarrior Destiny, the Dark Heresy Haarlock's Legacy campaign, and some turbo nerd Robotech/Stargate crack crossover running on the Edge of the Empire rules. Wouldn't you know it, all of these are even more homework than Arden Vul! There is probably something very wrong with me.
Thanks for the writeup! At some point, I need to read Fantasy Craft if only to harvest the usable components
Going through something like this, I totally and fully understand how, after going cross-eyed trying to come up with rulings over and over for these same questions, the D&D 3e folks ended up just building a skill system to handle it
I have a lot of problems with how 3e implemented its skill system; effectively, every skill check was just Lift Gates but for something else. This meant your ability to do everything from be charming to know about plants was restricted by your class (in the form of class skills and skills points per level), and your class in D&D is your character's chosen form of doing violence, not really anything meaningful about their place in the world. Fantasy Craft doesn't get truly radical with it, but it shortens the skill list, makes Knowledge its own thing separate from skills, and character creation lets you pick some skills that are considered always class skills for you, minimum of 2 sometimes more, so if you want to be a fighter with a silver tongue or who knows how to provide medical care, you don't have to fight the skill system to make that work. In general, Fantasy Craft's design ethos is to put more of the tools of the game in the players' and GM's hands in a way that lets them combine things they way they want instead of silently expecting things to follow established trends.
The 2nd Printing of the core rulebook is still up on DTRPG, although the game itself has been abandoned by the publisher and they shut down the forum a few years ago, so there is very little homebrew material that survives for it. Just be warned the editing of the rulebooks is almost as bad as Barton's and I can never remember where the table of vision and hearing modifiers is or what the Acceptance value of an NPC's Disposition means. The rule that Sprawled characters have their damage resistance from worn armor -- but not natural DR! -- halved is not noted in the definition for the Sprawled condition. It's in the Armor section of the Gear chapter, specifically in the definition for the DR column of the armor table. I did not know that rule existed until about four months ago. It is a good game, but you can really tell the two leads were working on it as a side hustle.
I'm impressed. Not just that you ran this thing for so long, but that you also provided such valuable feedback for the community. If we don't have people providing that detailed critique, we don't get to see the where to the "fresh" or "rotten" (to borrow the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator system) ratings came from.
Also, I wanted to say that your blog is one of the more unique spaces in the wider OSR community. We have lots of people writing theory posts. Few people seem to want to talk about something equally valuable, which is technical writing and presentation. I'd argue that the technical writing piece is actually harder for 99% of would-be adventure writers than creating the adventure ideas and the dungeon rooms. Communicating such things in a clear and effective manner might be just as, if not more, important than the adventure concept itself.
It's easy to write something in a way you know how to run it at your table. It's a lot harder to write something in a way that anyone at any table know what the hell you're trying to say. We're luck to have you sharing your views with us. Thanks Beau.
Thank you so much Michael! ❤️
I also like to think I have the highest-quality comment section in the osr blog space. People seem to try to match the energy and I love it
A good comment section does not just happen because the right people wander in. It develops because you make thoughtful engagement feel normal and worthwhile.
Over time, people match that energy. They put more care into what they write because everyone else is doing the same, and because they know that kind of contribution will be noticed and appreciated. You have built the sort of space that attracts good commenters, encourages them to stay, and makes newcomers understand immediately what level of conversation is expected.
Congrats on the end! Really truly cannot imagine having read this beast front to back, let alone run the entire thing.
I'm curious to know, having now conquered Arden Vul, how your feelings towards megadungeons as a framework for adventures have changed? The three-axis "interconnected, dynamic, huge" classification system you mentioned seemed interesting, given how it can lead you to perhaps reconsider what exactly is necessary to provide a good experience in a dungeon.
Anyways, thanks for the writeups and hopefully your next games will be easier/less monotonous!
> I'm curious to know, having now conquered Arden Vul, how your feelings towards megadungeons as a framework for adventures have changed?
Yeah - originally I was very optimistic about how we'll they'd run and I was hoping that I could spend a bunch of time up-front and then my week-to-week prep would be easy. Boy was I wrong.
I do think Arden Vul could be *a lot* easier to run if we applied a herculean amount of technical writing, but that megadungeons as a structure have this cursed problem where they want to have thousands of rooms of pre-written content, but the content is deeply interconnected and so invariably whatever you wrote in the rooms is probably "out of date" after a few sessions. Whereas if you instead spread that content out over a hexcrawl the size of ireland, the stuff in the manticore lair in the west coast is probably still there even though the players torched a kobold complex on the east coast.
I think going forward, I would never run anything with over 300 (just making up a reasonable-ish number) encounter areas (and so Xyntillan, coming in at 295, is the upper bound), instead preferring to have the ability to slot in multiple locations, mix things up, etc.
A lot of the items in your verdict section are handled well by a VTT implementation. Just giving a few examples, with Fantasy Grounds (available for free and in every conceivable way better than roll20, foundry has similar tools but costs $), automation and hyperlinks solve a lot of your requests.
For the sorted monster HP issue, you create encounters and with one click add them to combat tracking. If you are using a battle map, this adds them to the map, otherwise just to the tracker. They are numbered and you have an option on your campaign setup to make it random or sequential. HP can be minimum, maximum, average, or rolled and happens instant and effortlessly when you click the one button to activate.
For stores, there are extensions which create stores players can interact with that have stock, prices, maximum buy and sell levels, etc. you create them once then let the players use it without you.
For text and what to read, there's a right click option to format text to appear in chat. So you can prep that highlighted stuff, and click it for the players as well as read it as the DM, this sets it off in a box easy to see.
The grid issue is solved if you use a gridless map.and let the VTT lay a grid onto it. Similarly they can all let you pre-place the lights so you know what's lighted and not.
What VTTs won't solve is the need to make all the rolls, or define the undefined NPCs and automate the factions, or do your restocking, etc. still, that's a lot of the lifting done. But, someone has to doo all the hard work of getting it into the VTT first. Which is where your community project comes in.
Has anyone done this work that can share it?
edit: yeah - agreed that having a full implementation would be a huge QoL improvement
It really is a game that begs for a good Eye of the Beholder/Might and Magic style adaptation. You'd lose the freedom of the table, but having clearly defined interactions and automation of the procedural stuff would let the art really shine
I was thinking a while back how cool of a grim fandango/monkey-island style game it would make
With the prominence of background art in those games: Hell. Yes. Being able to *see* the halls and all their decaying grandeur is a part of what keeps me going through this and having it digitally painted, especially in vintage pixel art, would be a feast for the eyes.
Thinking about this more, you don't need a full implementation for it to help tremendously. Even a few bits up front, and then adding more as you go along would alleviate a ton of the workload.
I am not aware of an implementation for any VTT. Alas.
I really appreciate your detail-oriented and analytical style of reviewing. Even if we’re not running this specific module it’s super valuable to see these principles of adventure design being applied.
I am wondering—if your conclusion is to “buy but don’t run” this megadungeon, is there a megadungeon that you do recommend for GMs that rewards the time investment with workable systems?
Aesthetically I really like Arden Vul, the faction interplay, the historical depth and interlaced puzzles making exploration really rewarding, but the scale does feel almost untenable. Have you encountered other megadungeons that lean into the dynamism/interconnectivity without striving to be quite so huge?
I elaborated more in the level 3 review (https://rancourt.substack.com/i/207036416/conclusions) but I think that megadungeons are cursed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ). The structure itself is trying to do something that isn't possible to fully realize.
I think the main ways around it are:
1) explicitly reduce the interconnectivity somehow. maybe the dungeon floors are thousands of feet apart (like Paizo's emerald spire). maybe the denizens are all under the sway of one being (delicious in dungeon). Maybe we just directly accept the problem and tell the GM to only propagate actions in 1 degree of separation.
2) explicitly reduce the pre-written content. Blades of gixa seems like it's more of a big overview / vibe than it is thousands of rooms of pre-defined content. Gary only had vague ideas for the other levels that he'd only spec out as the players were getting to them
> Have you encountered other megadungeons that lean into the dynamism/interconnectivity without striving to be quite so huge?
I've only really skimmed one other megadungeon - stonehell, and broadly was unimpressed. Thracia is on my list!
>“Interconnected, Dynamic, Huge; pick 2”
But I want all three! If I'm playing a campaign that doesn't have campaign potential ("huge") or where my actions doesn't matter ("interconnected" and "dynamic") then I quickly lose interest. I think the key is to try to balance the three instead of sacrificing one. I want the dungeon to be dynamic but it doesn't need to be that dynamic. Example:
>My party kills the halflings. The goblins expand into the halfling area. This involves the goblins spreading out... I should also update the level 3 random encounters to include goblins
Good. This is enough dynamism to keep the game live. Players did something, the obvious consequence happened. Let's continue play.
>so they’d redistribute their possessions, furniture, and treasure. This means all of the room keys in the goblin warrens are out-of-date and need to be rewritten... and then probably also adjust the frequency for encounters in the goblin warrens (since it’s now less populated).
Now you're on "optional" territory. If you feel inspired as a GM then feel free to update the goblin warrens. This borders on adventure design, which many GMs enjoy but which I know you try to avoid. If you don't want to do this, then just handwave it: The goblins are fecund and only constrained by space so it makes sense that they would quickly increase population to fill the new territory. The treasure in the new territory can be unkeyed stuff they looted there. It's believable enough.
>But now that the lizardmen are distracted, that’s the perfect opportunity for the fishmen in the drowned canyon to move in, which causes...
Now your entering crazy territory. No need to do this unless inspiration makes you want to.
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There are examples that are harder to handle: What if the players spread a deadly plague in the Arena? What if they give a faction a bunch of powerful tech? But I still think the principle above applies: Make enough change to keep the game dynamic. Don't do work you don't enjoy.
Iif you really really want to avoid this kind of GM "work" then I think you have to make a hard sacrifice in the “Interconnected, Dynamic, Huge" triangle. But I (and many other GMs) enjoy this. It's fun to think about how a Arena plague will mess up the dungeon. Sure, there's some busywork in rekeying but I rush that and it's usually good enough.
Yeah - there are goods that are of medium quality that you can have delivered soonish, and are mid-price.
I think the traditional way to have a huge campaign is to either be making the megadungeon on the fly (so now you're only writing the key based on all of the stuff that's happened once) or with a hexcrawl so that everything is less connected.
Imo if you don't want the fishmen to be responding to the lizardmen respond to the goblins responding to the halflings dying to the players, then we should pick a different structure where that isn't what would happen! There are many such structures!
>Imo if you don't want the fishmen to be responding to the lizardmen respond to the goblins responding to the halflings dying to the players
I want a medium level of dynamism. Since I can't force Barton to write a new Arden Vul with a bit more space between factions, then I need to work with what I have. If this means fudging away most second order effects then that seems like a small price to pay. Reasons I have to not worry much about the fishmen response-response:
1. I think you're doing too much rational kobold. It's not unreasonable that a good-but-not-great opportunity falls into the lap of the lizardmen or fishmen and that they just do nothing about it.
2. It's very unclear how the lizardmen will respond, and even more unclear how the fishmen will respond in turn. And it's unclear if the consequences of these responses will be good or bad for them and others. So in the cloud of all this uncertainty it makes sense to me to collapse it down to "status quo continues".
3. Will the players notice that the GM handwaved away the second order consequences of their actions? Likely not, and thus it doesn't matter. If the players find a fishman and ask him about how they responded to the lizardmen response to the goblins expansion then the fishman can just say "we noticed something was up with the lizardmen so we did a small raid but they fought us back and nothing really changed.". The illusion holds.
4. We want the players to make informed decisions. But too much butterfly effect ruins this. If my party clears the halflings and we return to find that the goblins have taken the empty territory in response, then it feels like I made a choice that had a consequence. If my party clears the halflings and we return to find that the entire dungeon has been taken over by mutant troll-hequity hybrids then it feels utterly random. It doesn't matter if the later is what logically "should" happen or if it's the outcome of my GMs BLORB simulation or whatever, it still doesn't create good play.
And again, if the fishmen response-response really inspires my GM genius then I'd go wild on it. Sure it's work but it's mostly fun work (at least for me).
> Since I can't force Barton to write a new Arden Vul with a bit more space between factions, then I need to work with what I have. If this means fudging away most second order effects then that seems like a small price to pay
Yup - this is, effectively, what we're all doing. Yet, no one *writes this down*; barton certainly doesn't explain in the module that you're not expected to simulate to this detail, the 1e DMG doesn't explain that, and the broader OSR blog space doesn't explain that. Instead, we have pieces like https://headofthegoat.itch.io/new-simulationism
Alternatively, we can just... not play Arden Vul (which is what I recommend, given the laundry list of things I think are broken). Not every product is worth playing or trying to salvage! I think a lot of folks disagree with me (especially from the reddit thread), but that's my take; I feel the same way about ~half of Gabor Lux's stuff. Or, instead of trying to publish huge megadungeons as commercial products, we can instead focus on writing structures that don't have the above problem (like 50-room dungeons or hex-crawls, or the first floor of a mega-dungeon with notes on how to expand the rest as you play)
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> 4. We want the players to make informed decisions. But too much butterfly effect ruins this.
I totally share this insight. I remember replying to colton in the On Difficulty post with this reddit comment I wrote way back https://old.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/1pgxhqu/odd_d6_only_damage_how_do_you_make_individual/nsxu1dk/
talks about the tension between authentic simulation, narrative satisfaction, and having-a-good-game. Often times authentic simulation is *boring* and produces not-interesting-for-gaming results. Some advocates (like the acks discord) just say you're not simulating enough; I think that's largely bullshit and creates unrealistic expectations.
I want have reasonable expectations and to *write down* what those are.
I've personally run into this with stuff like war dogs in OSE. Mechanically they're strictly upside. They're bags of HP, have attacks, and can be bought cheaply. My table walked into castle xyntillan with 20 war dogs and it was a nightmare.
The downside of war dogs is probably supposed to be non-mechanical. Dogs bark at inconvenient times. They're difficult to wrangle. They pee on stuff and that smell can be tracked by a lot of predators.
If the GM doesn't simulate any of that, then war dogs will be *way* too strong for their price and you end up with degen gameplay. If they get too into the weeds about undescribed dog behavior, then players feel like they're getting punished for buying an option in the book and that doesn't feel fair either, so there's some sort of sweet spot.
The system authors and adventure authors *tend* to not write down their expectations for how this stuff works; and so stuff gets really wonky really quickly
I agree that there's missing theory for how to "fudge" (for lack of a better terms) adventures on the fly in a good way. I don't think there's a single OSR adventure of >10 pages that doesn't benefit from some tweaking during play. (And there's no OSR system that isn't broken somewhere either.)
I agree that you shouldn't run Arden Vul, but mostly because it's too big. 50 rooms is too little to support a campaign IMO, but 300 rooms is more than enough. Running a larger dungeon is mostly GM vanity. The glut of treasure and the OP magic items doesn't bother me as much: I'll fudge those away on the fly. If the unlimited invincibility seems to break the campaign, I just handwave a limit for it. If 20 war dogs becomes a staple I'll tell the players that I'm not enjoying it so please stop. I know this isn't your style.
>The system authors and adventure authors *tend* to not write down their expectations for how this stuff works; and so stuff gets really wonky really quickly
This is why we need the fudges. But an author cannot write down everything. And authors are mostly normal guys who don't think things through that much. Thus tweaking is ok. "What would this system/adventure look like if the author was enlightened and didn't make mistakes?" That's the game I'm trying to play, not the actual words on paper. And then again the game becomes arbitrary but then again that's the charm of tabletop RPGs over boardgames and CRPGS IMO.
This is a very smart response. When it comes to the Blorb principles I can totally see detail-oriented STEM-types (like me...) get sniped by the idea that respecting blorb implies simulating a whole world, down to the atom level, between sessions. But we need to rember that just like the "OSR primer" was a response to 3e, the Blorb principles are a response to scandinavian larp-type rpgs where you play by candelight and facts about the "world" are malleable. In some sense, the fundamental insight of classic d&d is that the world as a whole is the primary object of play rather than the story or the characters, and that important facts about it should be established in advance. But, as the only existing example of a Blorb milieu by the author shows, there are really not so many details required do get a good game out of the DM's efforts.
So how did you end up adjudicating your own questions about how to handle magic items?
For recognizing, I describe all magic items as "shiny" as a sort of long-running inside joke
For identifying, we just have Diablo style scrolls of identify the players can buy for 200g a pop
For liquidity, I pulled in the acks 2 rules, simplified here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FJFEEfss6LaT7WdOLb3l6nbaHamjrzSXeaXAFRERkGg/edit?usp=drivesdk
That thing is a beast. Congrats to you, your party and thanks for the posts!
> There are dozens of treasure maps, both buried in existing hoards, found as random loot in burial niches, or clutched in the hands of adventurers. Those should probably be real handouts, but someone has to make them!
Someone did! Most of them anyway (I think). You can find them on the Arden Vul Facebook group, and on the 3d6DTL Discord server.
Can you grab them for me? I'm part of neither groups
boom got it; thanks. I added it to the resources section https://rancourt.substack.com/i/188158760/in-game-maps