Crumbling Dens of the Moth-Emperor

Some years ago, I decided I wanted to run an old-fashioned dungeon-crawl. The kind I had read about online and in Dragon magazine back in the day, the kind that D&D seemed made to actually do properly. Something that felt a bit like Torchlight, I reckoned, without any search for narrative that wasn’t “more gold, more xp”. Something extremely crunchy, wherein all my other games tend toward the other end of the scale.

I made some outline plans, put up a campaign on D&D Beyond (with a name rolled up from the tables in the Tome of Adventure Design), made some maps, and then didn’t get traction with it. Sometime this summer Aidan nudged me about it, and I went to look at the material I had, and saw how it could be better, but didn’t do anything about it. And then a few weeks back I read this Tumblr post, and something got moving in my head.

Last night saw the first session of Crumbling Dens of the Moth-Emperor, and it seems to have been pretty successful. I had six players (from about a dozen who are going to be dropping in and out), I had my special combination of hand-drawn and Photoshopped maps (and my cross-hatching was complimented, which was deeply gratifying), and there was a good mix of combat, somewhat puzzle-y material, reasoning around what the dungeon actually was, and interactions between characters.

The concept is that the player characters are members of the Edolon Guild of Delvers (not the Guild of Delvers of Edolon, not the New Edolon Guild of Delvers, etc.), one of a few dozen guilds licensed by the Governer of Heliomar, which are authorised to explore the ruins of the continent, and take stuff out of them for sale back in the Empire of Ayuur. The Edolon Guild of Delvers is one of the oldest guilds, and as such has a wide range of scouts, agents, researchers, and sellers. And, of course, delvers.

There isn’t much interaction with the world outside the dungeon. It’s essentially a list of goods and services available from the town of Edolon, really, and there are some guild porters who keep a base camp running just outside the entrance, so the characters don’t even have to go into town themselves. The game is all within the ruins. At the start of any given mission (“delve”), a bunch of characters venture in, and until they come out again, those characters are present. They’ll be played by someone else if “their” player is not available, either by someone already in who can make the session and handle the cognitive load of two characters, or by someone parachuted in for that one session.

We’re using Zoom and Owlbear Rodeo, and so far all the characters are on D&D Beyond, although that’s not compulsory - my only requirement is that I be able to see the sheet between sessions, so even a paper character sheet will do if the player sends me a photograph of it at the end of each game.

Thus far, the first delve - the characters sensibly decided to emerge from the dungeon for a long rest, rather than try to camp within - included encounters with moth-eyed skeletons, animated statues, and a conversation, via Speak With Animals, with some weird little metal-eating deer, although since it took place from a great distance above through a hole in a floor/ceiling, I don’t know if it was really an encounter. At least one of the player characters was quite upset at the prospect of the deer eating the gold coins visible in that particular chamber.

It’s interesting running combat for experienced players at level 1. It’s fast; we got through two combat encounters plus a lot of exploration and interaction in about 3.5 hours. The first encounters were intentionally fairly tactically simple, and they can rack up in complexity afterward. Level 1 characters are fragile, though, and I think it’s down to having experienced players that everyone survived. Both of the front-line people, a cleric and a fighter, were knocked unconscious during one of the encounters, and had there not been a healer (the bard) there to stand them up again at an opportune point in the initiative order, the encounter could have been a lot more lethal.

In the style of old-school D&D, more or less, I’m not pulling punches with the monsters. There will be a relationship between distance into the dungeon, and the nominal Challenge Rating of the things encountered, but at this stage I know fine well that CR is not a rigid measurement, and I’m willing to throw out some more lethal stuff as well as the easier encounters. There’s definitely some stuff on the random encounter tables that will kill a character or two, even at these relatively early stages, let alone the set encounters. And I fully expect to have a few characters show up as replacements who are the previous character’s sibling, with remarkably similar stats. Or, admittedly, completely different characters, because D&D players and magpies do have a lot in common.

The campaign structure does allow for a TPK without the campaign ending, though, which I feel is useful. In some ways, the guild allows for an ensemble approach, as used in Ars Magica or the like, and if Party 1.0 doesn’t emerge from the dungeon for a week, well, Party 2.0 might be able to retrieve some bodies and get resurrections done. Maybe.

Thus far I’m very pleased with it, and looking forward to the next session. If you’re interested in playing, and a Monday evening slot (Irish time) suits you, drop me a line, and I’ll send you on some of the opening documents.