Continuing with the prompts from d4 Caltrops’s d100 Table of Topics to Blog About, here are some more short ones.

21 – Draw or Describe a Treasure Map your Players might discover in Play I like to clip parts of the actual dungeon map to give the players as treasure maps. I combined all of the various versions of Undermountain across the editions for my Mad Mage game, and the players bought a partial map of level 2 from a vendor in the goblin market. The map showed a path going east, then north off the map, then presumably back onto the map before continuing further east. What it didn’t show was that the missing segment was a really long jaunt through the dungeon. Not very helpful, but you get what you pay for in the goblin market.

In my Ptolus game, the players are looking for the Tablet of Chaos in the Barrowmaze under the Necropolis (the big Ptolus book says there are ghoul tunnels under the graveyard but doesn’t detail them, sigh. So I stuck the Barrowmaze megadungeon under there and mapped the barrows to fit the Necropolis. It works surprisingly well and makes sense of where all the undead are coming from). They got a section of the map that shows the Four Fingered Crypt, a landmark near where the Tablet is hidden. However, the Barrowmaze is huge. I use a foldout map I made that’s composed of six full-size sheets of paper taped together. They’ve been wandering around trying to find the crypt, and at some point I mumbled what room number they were in, and they matched it up with the numbers I had neglected to scrub off the map I gave them. “We’re almost there!” Ha, but this place truly is a maze, good luck! But it’s fine, secrets are there to be discovered, and there are some good ones waiting for them if they ever find the Tablet.

23 – How are Skeletons Made? Ghouls? Why haven’t Wraiths/Vampires taken over? Ptolus, as I’ve mentioned before, takes everything from D&D 3e and smooshes it into one city without much regard for ecology. So skeletons are presumably made the traditional way, when two skeletons love each other very much. There’s definitely a big question there about why high-powered undead haven’t taken over the city. The Necropolis is chock full of undead and demons that come out at night, and it kind of offers a shrug as to why they never breach the Necropolis walls. This was a bit too much for me. I took the mansion full of demons and stuck it in the shadow realm, and I explained the undead with the aforementioned Tablet of Chaos.

In Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King, no one has a soul, just like in real life, or at least not one that carries your personality and memories. There may be some sort of animating energy that can linger after death, and that’s why wraiths are hateful inversions of the living, they’re missing most of what makes you a person. Skeletons and zombies are just corpses animated by magic. Ghouls are humanoids who’ve been overcome by cannibalism, or maybe they’re a cult. They aren’t undead proper, but they can be affected by things like Turn Undead as if they were because of their deep unholiness.

I’m not sure if there will be high-powered undead like vampires or liches. If there are, then they’ll be rare, if not unique, in keeping with the themes of the setting. This isn’t a vampire, this is the vampire. They want to be singular, to keep power for themselves. Or they’re fading demigods, like the others throughout the land. Maybe they strove to become demigods and failed somehow along the way and they’re stuck between life and death in a mockery of immortality.

War is another theme of the setting, and I like the idea of a wraith-ridden battlefield that no one knows how to cross.

24 – How big does a Dungeon have to be to qualify for the “Mega” Appellation? For as many words as have been spilled on this topic, I think it has an easy answer. A megadungeon is big enough to support an entire adventuring campaign. It is too big to be cleared because there are enough rooms that they will be restocked while you’re elsewhere. How many rooms is that? I don’t know, I’ll default to the 1964 Supreme Court ruling in Gygax v. Wisconsin and the words of Justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it.”