The Tragic Tale of Julius Corple part one

A while back my players spent a couple of sessions searching for keycards and passwords to give them access to various places in the ancient military complex/megadungeon that they were exploring.  They knew, from some snooping around through personnel records on a computer, that the two head scientists in the facility were Julius Corple (in charge of the Alien Weapons division) and Hodges Craigslist (in charge of the Biological Weapons division).  Earlier, they had found a door labelled "Alien Weapons Research" that they had been unable to open.  Reasoning that the head of the Alien Weapons division must hold the key to this tempting area, they made their way to Julius Corple's quarters.  

Right away they realized that something was different with Corple's chambers - they could not access any interior cameras through the buildings computer network, and in fact, it seemed that the suite of rooms was not connected in any way to the power and computer networks of the rest of the facility.  They could not cut the power to the door and the normal spiderbot access shafts that connected almost every other part of the facility had been sealed off.  

Undeterred, a party member capable of teleportation bravely transported his body blindly through the closed door and luckily did not end up materializing in a space already occupied by a solid object!  He was greeted by an enthusiastic robot dog (named "Woody" according to the engraving on its water bowl) and a rather spartan set of apartments.  Corple apparently took his work home with him, as his bed, chairs and couch were low disks that utilized the alien repulsor field technology to suspend a body in mid-air above them.  The door opened easily enough from the inside, and the rest of the party entered.  Woody seemed overjoyed to have company after centuries alone, and instantly took to following the party around.  They found very little in the way of information on Corple's computers, which actually seemed to have been unused at all.  Likewise, they found no books or journals that might contain a clue or a scribbled pass phrase.

On Corple's bare desk sat a holo-portrait, the only furnishing in the entire suite that spoke of human warmth, depicting a woman with long brown hair and a pleasant smile.  The holo-projector was engraved with the words "Darling Alyssa".  Saying those words aloud resulted in the large repulsor disc that served for a bed rotating to the side and revealing a shaft opening up into a chamber below.  Descending down the short ladder, the party entered a room that unnerved them greatly.  The chamber that they found themselves in was glass-walled and circular.  Behind the glass walls pink and blue organic tissues throbbed and pulsed with visible electrical energy.  A confusing tangle of cables and what seemed to be umbilical chords passed through portals in the glass and connected with the naked body of a man lying in the middle of the floor.  This body was apparently Julius Corple, as the pile of synthetic military issue clothing next to the man contained his keycard.  Interestingly, and this is what really creeped out the party, they soon realized that Corple was still alive. His hair and fingernails had evidently been growing for centuries, and he did not respond to any stimulus, but his heart was beating and he was breathing.  They grabbed his keycard and beat a hasty retreat.

Part Two reveals how Julius Corple brought about the downfall of the military facility.

The Megadungeon in the Mutant Future part two

It may seem a little presumptuous to call my ancient military complex a megadungeon.  At the present, I think it only has about a hundred, maybe 150 rooms that the players know about- surely this is too small to qualify?  The key to that statement are the words "at the present".  There is plenty of room to expand, and I have already planted the seeds in the players' heads that will eventually lead to the exploration of three more large areas.  And as play continues, I am sure I will plant more seeds and more areas will be discovered.  As it is, the first time the players ran through the complex they spent several sessions searching for the gold key cards that would allow them to access some of the sealed off areas.  When they finally did find them, they ended up getting chased away by some Warangutans and haven't returned yet.  This means that after six straight four to six hour sessions, the players still have only scratched the surface of the complex.  The door temptingly labeled "Alien Weapons Division" is still unopened!  Likewise, the top secret area that they learned about in Julius Corple's papers is still virgin territory (an upcoming post will detail the tragic story of Julius Corple, brilliant roboticist and the unwitting cause of the downfall of the military complex at the hands of the Oozyxphg).  The players turned tail and ran from one of the largest levels of the complex before they had even really began to explore it, because they realized it was the home to two groups of warring, possibly partially robotic killer apes (think Planet of the Apes meets Vietnam with a little bit of Robocop thrown in and you have an idea of what that level was like).  There are several long tunnels leading from the lowest hanger level, one of which evidently leads up to the swamp because it was flooded and nearly drowned the players when they opened it; it took some pretty heroic and nearly self sacrificial actions from two players to save the rest of the party from a watery grave.  However, the other tunnel leads to the labyrinthine science complexes underneath the old university inhabited by the Ooh Oh Monks, and offshoots lead to places as yet unknown to the players.  Only a handful of the officers' and scientists' quarters have been explored, as the players mostly focused on those that they suspected might contain a gold key card.  All in all, the campaign could easily go on for a long long time in this one network of underground chambers, and that makes it a megadungeon in my book.

One of the things that James over at Grognardia identifies as a key feature of a classic megadungeon is that it is dynamic and changes in response to the players.  My little complex is an excellent example of this; play began with it flooded with poisonous gasses, so besides the odd alien critters that had come through the portal from the Oozyxphgian homeworld, it was mostly robots that the party had to deal with.  However, these robots were not sitting idly by waiting to be discovered.  The still active security cameras sweeping the corridors detected the party's movement despite some interesting efforts to circumvent them, and a team of robotic defenders was dispatched.

When the party eventually shut the gas off, the apes and other denizens who had been trapped in self-contained areas of the complex that the gas had not been able to reach soon emerged and this really changed the dynamic of the area.  As the party was trying to make it to the armory that they had seen on a building schematic in a computer they hacked into, they realized that they had been beaten there by the War Chimps.  They watched through a camera feed with a mixture of curiosity and horror as the War Chimps easily handled several Scorpions and took control of the coveted armory.

I have always been a big fan of moving monsters around the dungeon; it prevents complacency by the PCs and it makes the dungeon feel "alive".  The most recent example of this from my campaign occurred during the last session.  The party has been out in the eastern desert involved in some tricky diplomacy in an effort to prevent the Knights of Genetic Purity from gaining access to nuclear weapons controlled by three oft-times warring desert tribes.  During the last session, the Swamp Orca (the party's hovercraft, purloined from the hangar level of the megadungeon and outfitted with Glarg-ore armor courtesy of the Badder master smiths) took some serious damage and was on the verge of a total breakdown.  The skirt that contained the cushion of air had been badly ripped, so Logan the incredible teleporting shrinking man teleported back to the hangar level to scavenge sections from the skirts of the other ruined hovercrafts that they had left behind.  When he arrived, he noticed that the level was being patrolled by the Warangutans.  He also noticed that the massive blast door which sealed the hangar off from the tunnels leading to the Ooh Oh Monks and the Badders' tunnels was wide open, and a large pile of Badder corpses was stacked near the tunnel mouth.  The party correctly deduced that the Badders (who the party had given the code to open the door) had attempted to scavenge more of the ruined vehicles in the hangar to offer as scrap metal to their lord Glargorion and had run into the Warangutans.  As several of the party members were quite taken with the great worm god (Dataan has been spreading the gospel of Glargorion wherever he goes) and the entire party was quite grateful to the Badders for their assistance in crafting Glarg-ore weapons and armor for them, the last session ended with talk of returning to the military complex to deal with the Warangutans.  Having things occur in the absence of the party is a useful tool, and one that greatly adds to immersion in a game world.

Stay tuned for more lessons from the megadungeon, including the tragic tale of Julius Corple!

The Megadungeon in the Mutant Future

James had a thought provoking post about megadungeons over at Grognardia this afternoon, and it made me want to share a little about my own post-apocalyptic megadungeon.  This first post will be a session recap of the first expedition into the megadungeon, and I plan subsequent posts detailing the party's later (and much more thorough) explorations as well as a "behind the screen" look at how I run a megadungeon (sneak preview: add 1 part map, 1 part critter encounter list, a dash of preparation in the form of quick notes on areas, and a whole lot of winging it and that is Grandma Nashes Old Fashioned Megadungeon recipe!).

In the first few sessions of my campaign I had thrown out a bunch of possible plot hooks to see what the players wanted to bite at.  One involved a group of cephalopoid traders showing up in Spanky Butt with a ton of strange artifacts and a story about exploring a building to the west in the swamp, causing a cave in, and releasing an outpouring of thick, hot mist.  As the swamp used to be covered night and day in a similar mist, allowing the dreaded vampire bats to fly around at all hours, the players were quite keen to get to the bottom of this and "turn off the mist" as they put it.

So I cobbled together a couple maps of two high rise buildings that I snagged on Google image search, sunk them into the earth, drew connecting passages between the two and called them an ancient military complex.  This worked quite well as the basis for my megadungeon, as both floorplans allowed for choice in exploration both within a level and between levels.  I drew several expansions off the sides of the buildings (being underground, I was not constrained by the footprint of the ground floor as an actual high rise building is).  Multiple stairwells and elevator shafts connected the levels, and it was out of one of the open elevator shafts that the mists were pouring.  I made a few quick notes about the general theme of each level, wrote down a few reminders to myself (effects of prolonged exposure to the "mist", which was really the noxious atmosphere of the Oozyxphgian homeworld pouring out of an open portal in the lowest level, visibility in the mist, where the active security cameras were and what sort of security robots were still working), and went to the next session ready to wing it.  I had sketchily keyed the top level and the rooms directly around each entrance to the second level.

Well, the best laid plans of mice and Mutant Lords, as they say.  The players were totally freaked out by the cameras tracking their movements and the oppressive mists and they ran through the first level in the direction that they could feel the mists coming from and came to the open elevator shaft.  They tossed some debris in and realized they were standing in front of a drop of at least several hundred feet (actually more like 500' to the bottom!).  I described the metallic clickety clack of the spider bots that were closing in on them and the heavier thud thud thud of the scorpion's armored legs following close behind.  And thats when the party surprised me, as they are wont to do.  Bozko the giant shapeshifting mutant plant altered his form to completely fill the elevator shaft and I told him that the mist was pressurized and began lifting him up toward the top of the shaft.  He changed his form slightly to allow the mist to stream through several holes in his body and told the rest of the group to climb on top of him.  He enlarged the holes enough to decrease the pressure to the point that he began descending the shaft.  They ignored all the side exits and went straight to the bottom, all the way down to the 7th level, ignoring everything that I had prepared.  Good thing I had made a few notes on the main themes of each level!

I knew that they had just emerged in a vast hangar, filled with the twisted wreckage of old military vehicles of all descriptions.  The mist was incredibly thick down there, as the atmospheric pressure of the Oozxyphgian homeworld is quite a bit greater than that of earth, so the fumes were being pushed through the portal by the crushing weight of an alien atmosphere.  As I described the fused remains of the tanks and unmanned drones  emerging from the choking fog that they were walking through, I also told them that they could hear something clattering down the sides of the elevator shaft above them.  They fought against the streaming mist and made their way to its origin, two peculiar poles of an unknown metallic composition, between which a shimmering gate opened into an alien landscape.  The air breathers in the party were making saves every minute of game time or taking damage, and were slowly dying.  As they tried to figure out how to shut off the gate, the spiderbots and scorpion made their appearance and I thought I might have a TPK on my hands.  Well, it wasn't my fault they had chosen to descend all the way to the near airless depths when they could have fought the robots on their own terms 500' above!  Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.

Cue party surprising Mutant Lord, part two.  Millard Fillmore, the intrepid swamp trapper, mutant human and NOT the 13th president of the United States despite many vociferous claims to the contrary, has a light-controlling mutation which he used to displace the laser targeting dots the spiderbots were shining on the party back onto one of the spiderbots.  The scorpion launched some missiles, and most of the spiderbots were vaporized.  Unfortunately, some of the party was caught in the radius of the explosion and also suffered some near fatal damage.  Meanwhile, the two technologically inclined party members were hard at work messing with the gate.  They figured out that the seemingly seamless pillars actually were composed of 8 rotating sections, each of which clicked into 8 different positions as they were rotated (that was complete improv on my part, I had not got as far as figuring out how the portal worked or how to turn it off!).  They began twisting the sections and observing the results as the rest of the party tried to hold off the robots.  Someone had the bright idea of hiding on the far side of the gate (which was one sided - that is the mist only poured out of one surface of it and from the far side it simply appeared as a rippling obstruction of space) while Millard projected the image of the party in front of the gate so that the fire of the scorpion would go through the gate and explode harmlessly in an alien world.  This worked on the scorpion, but the remaining spiderbots had much too sophisticated sensory equipment to be fooled for long.

In the meantime, however, I had been having the two tech-heads make tech rolls to see how much progress they were making on the gate.  I had decided on the spot to start out with a relatively difficult benchmark and every roll above that would cause the gate to expand, while rolls below it would cause the gate to contract.  Each roll that caused a contraction would raise the benchmark, making it progressively easier to shut it down - I reasoned that since they were observing the effect each manipulation of the pillar had on the gate, it would be easy to tell what was working and what wasn't.  As the spiderbots were making their way around the gate and picking up the actual position of the party, the players managed to shrink the gate considerably with several very low rolls.  The spiderbots targeted the party using their vibration sensors, and signalled their position to the scorpion.  Just as the scorpion began to come around the portal to unload on the party, the tech guys rolled a near critical failure.  I think they got a 98 on a d100, or something like that; in any case, the portal expanded dramatically and swallowed the scorpion up in its expansion.  Their next roll was ridiculously successful, a 3 on d100 minus their combined bonuses put it at something like -20.  I ruled that they had closed the portal, trapping the scorpion on the other side.  It just seemed too dramatic and serendipitous an ending to pass up.  The remaining spiderbots quickly high tailed it, lacking any firepower of their own.

Most of the party was near death and everyone except Dataan the robot (who had actually not revealed to the party yet that he was a robot, so he was pretending to be suffering along with the rest of them) and Bozko the plant were about to succumb to the poisonous gases that still filled the chamber.  They went back to the elevator shaft and quickly realized that without the atmospheric pressure pushing the mist, there was nothing to propel them up the shaft!  They were 700' below ground and had to start up a stairwell to get out the hard way...

And that is how the party truly began the exploration of my megadungeon, from the lowest level up!

My Art

Well, this post has nothing to do with Mutant Future at all. I didn't feel like creating a new blog, so I hereby declare that I can post anything I want on this blog by the power invested in me by blogspot. I am sure the majority of my posts will continue to be about my Mutant Future campaign because I am running weekly sessions that range from 4 to 7 hours so there is obviously a ton of material getting generated.

Today I wanted to post a few drawings that I have done recently, two monster drawings for the very interesting megadungeon.net site (I also did two maps for that site, the Fungus Forest and the Saint's Shrine) and an interior illustration for the upcoming Stonehell release that Mike over at The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope is working on. I am also working on another drawing for Mike that is unfinished as of yet, which I may post here later. It has been years since I drew anything other than doodles in the margins of my notes in class or strange things on the whiteboard in my office, so I am rather pleased with how these turned out.