On Limits

We’re now two sessions into Crumbling Dens of the Moth-Emperor (session 3 had to be postponed because at the time I should have been running it I was walking through the rocky desert expanses of Arches National Park, in the US, and that’s not conducive to a good game from anyone’s point of view). I’m doing lots of little bits of writing for it, both for the close-by areas of the dungeon, where players will arrive soon, and the more distant areas, where they’ll be at least a few levels higher.

I’m finding the experience of writing for a mega-dungeon campaign to be very interesting, and I’m trying to pin down exactly why. For a start, it’s very clear if an idea that passes through my head (which happens every 20 seconds or so, more if I focus) will fit the campaign or not. Is it suitable for underground spaces, combat focus, and the weirdly truncated history of the dungeon? If not, it just doesn’t go any further. It feels like it’s much harder to do that in the open spaces of a surface game, where the players can reasonably encounter just about anything around the next bend. Is it something that fits within the themes and factions of the dungeon? Is it good enough to make a new theme or faction? If so, it can go in, and if not, out it goes.

The annoying aspect of this is that I can’t see any reason I couldn’t apply this to the other games I run. They’d probably even benefit. But the walls of the dungeon give a much more solid-feeling limit to what fits and what doesn’t than any more metaphorical boundary in a surface game. It’s like poetry - I can write free-form stuff, blank verse and so on, but it never feels as though I’m doing as good a job as with a sonnet. Hm, dungeon as sonnet. 14 levels, 10 rooms per level…. Sorry, left the ideas engine on. But you see what I mean; it’s harder to come up with limits and restrictions for the non-dungeon game, even if it would leave to a better narrative and probably a clearer storyline.

I’m also more comfortable with making things actually random (or random within the constraints, rather) in the dungeon. I’m not sure what’s driving that, to be honest; the reasons for a particular encounter in any of my surface campaigns are usually opaque enough to the players that they might as well be random, but I’m never happy with “these stone giants just happened to be passing, and they’re aggressive”. Yet in the dungeon, I’ve a bunch of random tables for creatures to encounter (with which faction they’re attached to clearly noted), and I’m perfectly happy to roll on it. What makes the difference?

I think it comes back to the constraints. There’s no reason for, say, a faery dragon to be in the dungeon, so it doesn’t go on the encounter table. But if my constraint for the surface game is “what is reasonable to encounter in this biome?”, then that covers a lot of ground. Presumably, if my constraint is “What faction-connected thematic encounters can I make a list of and choose from at random and on the fly?”, I’ll end up with a table with which I’m happier. So the next surface game (which will likely be a world-hopping Spelljammer/Planescape monstrosity) will have fairly tight controls applied to it, and we’ll see how that goes.

However, there’s an element of constraint on the players, too. Part of the social contract, more or less, of the dungeon game is that all the characters are to a greater or lesser degree amoral loot-seekers. There’s nothing stopping that from being the case in a surface game, of course, but generally speaking one of the attractions of such a game is that you can play any character who has either a reason to follow the plot or a connection to a character that does. And the players in the dungeon campaign can’t - reasonably - just start burrowing west to see what’s there, whereas the more open-world game very definitely allows for following up on a random detail or deciding to settle down and run an inn. So I’m not sure how to handle that kind of limit in the surface game context. More thinking to do, clearly.