TSR Having multiple dungeons available to the players


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Warpiglet-7

Cry havoc! And let slip the pigs of war!
The Lost City?
I got the Goodman games version but different events and factions are what it is about. Being spread over several dungeons sounds like a bigger version I could have fun with!

Or rather having several interacting dungeon choices rather…
 

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Ringtail

World Traveller (She/Her)
You might want to look at Dragonbane for inspiration.

The box set includes 11 short adventures, that can be played in any order (except for one, which is to be played last.) It has a pretty classic setup: collect the 4 pieces of the maguffin to get the whatsit. Of course, nobody knows where the pieces are so you'll have to visit many different adventure sites in hopes of finding them. (The actual locations are determined by the GM.)

There's a nice rumor table to seed the different adventure sites. I started with the Riddermound and when the players get back to town, I'm going to drop three rumors and let them pick. There's a mixture of dungeons and also just points of interest, none of them are very large though so it doesn't feel overwhelming to prep. Its very much like Forbidden Lands in that respect.

Dragonbane is also a super fun system, that feels old-school and modern at the same time, but its just the adventure structure I'm suggesting. I was actually thinking of plugging the Caves of Chaos into it, but there's already so much content I'm not sure I want to overwhelm my players.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
This system works best if you're using purchased adventures. It can quickly spiral out of control if you hand-create most or all of your dungeons. (Speaking as someone who has done this to myself more than once.)
Yeah, a mix of canned modules and your own creations works best...unless you're in a situation where your players are already familiar with most of the canned modules you want to use; at which point you have a problem. :)
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
This isn't so bad. You just have to move the decision making portion to the end of the session instead of the beginning. At the end of the session just simply ask

"Where are you guys going next time?" and then you can prep that one between the sessions.
Which sounds great until, having told you one week they'll go to Dungeon B next session, they think it over during the week and decide to go to Dungeon C instead once that next session starts.

Seen this before, has I.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I quite like the OP idea of having 5 or 6 " active" dungeons on the go at once
As a player - if I had a wise character - I'd be very leery in-character of jumping from dungeon to dungeon like that.

"Great - we've wiped out the top level of this dungeon; now let's press our advantage. What? You want to go to another dungeon instead? OK, but by the time we get back here we're going to have to re-take this level all over again, and wasn't it enough of a nuisance this time? Never mind that while we're at the other dungeon we're going to have all the things we just pissed off here on our tail."

Never leave an enemy behind you.
 

Gus L

Explorer
Yeah, a mix of canned modules and your own creations works best...unless you're in a situation where your players are already familiar with most of the canned modules you want to use; at which point you have a problem. :)
I think one of the most useful skills one can have as a sandbox referee is the ability to pick and reskin other people's adventure modules. I mention this because it even if it seems second nature to some folks, especially those with a lot of experience with early play styles, I see lots of questions about it in "OSR" forums especially from people coming from newer systems.

First, to know what's good and more what's right for your setting. Not everything will be, not only are there a lot of bad or mediocre adventures out there, even some of the "classics", but there a ones that just won't fit. Having enough familiarity with your system and setting are helpful.

Second, knowing how to adjust prewritten stuff to make it fit. I find it's fairly easy, changing scenery and description - fiddling with monster stats. You can sometimes do it in play, but it's best to just write some notes over the thing. The difficulty becomes harder the more "story-based" a location is. That is to say if there's an entire narrative of hooks and connections or even more a series of events that occur in the adventure it's often harder to transform it into one's own setting then if it's simply a location to interact with. Even with the first though, the themes and antagonists in RPGs tend to be pretty simple and archetypical - which makes adjusting them possible much of the time.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I think one of the most useful skills one can have as a sandbox referee is the ability to pick and reskin other people's adventure modules. I mention this because it even if it seems second nature to some folks, especially those with a lot of experience with early play styles, I see lots of questions about it in "OSR" forums especially from people coming from newer systems.

First, to know what's good and more what's right for your setting. Not everything will be, not only are there a lot of bad or mediocre adventures out there, even some of the "classics", but there a ones that just won't fit. Having enough familiarity with your system and setting are helpful.

Second, knowing how to adjust prewritten stuff to make it fit. I find it's fairly easy, changing scenery and description - fiddling with monster stats. You can sometimes do it in play, but it's best to just write some notes over the thing. The difficulty becomes harder the more "story-based" a location is. That is to say if there's an entire narrative of hooks and connections or even more a series of events that occur in the adventure it's often harder to transform it into one's own setting then if it's simply a location to interact with. Even with the first though, the themes and antagonists in RPGs tend to be pretty simple and archetypical - which makes adjusting them possible much of the time.
Agreed.

That said, one of the points of using a canned module instead of a homebrew adventure is that, ideally, the canned module is much less work for the DM. Having to reskin it to the point where it's unrecognizable to players who've seen it before would probably be almost as much work as writing a module from scratch.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Which sounds great until, having told you one week they'll go to Dungeon B next session, they think it over during the week and decide to go to Dungeon C instead once that next session starts.

Seen this before, has I.
At which point you work on the group's interpersonal communication, tell them they're stuck with what they actually communicated to the DM, or improvise something. :)
 

Zaukrie

New Publisher
If you have five generic dungeons within 100 miles of a town that the players can pick and choose from does not really add much to the game. And it adds a lot of travel time....to dungeon A..back to town...to dungeon B.

And it makes for endless confusion. The players will have characters in dungeon C and encounter some skeletons and say "hey we go grab the barrels of holy water in the ruins of the shrine". And you have to tell the players that shrine is back in dungeon A 130 miles away.

And it can be weird, depending on how you do levels and experience. The players could just rotate through the first level of all five dungeons, for example. But when they level up, that level will get easy.

And.....you always have the people problem. The players pick dungeon A, and for three weeks adventure there. Then....for absolutely no reason other then they want too, they randomly say "Oh we go to dungeon B". Though it can be even worse when they encounter one stuck door and are like "whatever, we leave and go to dungeon C".
I don't understand how any of this is a problem? It reflects how people are in real life, doing random things.
 

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