2009: Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles—and so on, as the anniversaries come up. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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The very first adventure that roleplaying hobby gave us was the dungeon and the purest form of the dungeon is the megadungeon. The megadungeon is like a dungeon, a complex of rooms and corridors beneath the earth populated by traps, puzzles, treasure, and monsters, but on a larger scale. Often a much larger scale—a scale large enough that the dungeon itself becomes the focus of the campaign. In such a megadungeon, the player characters will either visit the dungeon again and again, returning to the surface regularly to rest, resupply, and research, or there may be areas within the dungeon where they can rest or even resupply, so that they rarely return to the surface. Although other fantasy and fantasy-like roleplaying games do do dungeons or dungeons that are not ‘dungeons’—for example, Numenera and Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne—the megadungeon remains very much the province of Dungeons & Dragons and its various editions and iterations. The Old School Renaissance—a period so far contemporaneous with Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—has been the greater source of the megadungeon in the last fifteen years. Notable examples include Barrowmaze and Dwimmermount, both published for use with Labyrinth Lord, both large tomes in themselves, but another megadungeon, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls, offers much more stripped back play.

Written and published by the author of The Dungeon Alphabet: An A-Z Reference for Classic Dungeon Design for use with Labyrinth Lord in 2009, Stonehell Dungeon offers a constrained five level dungeon with some seven hundred locations, complete with a detailed history, numerous factions, and a surprisingly reasonable rationale for its existence. And all that in just one hundred and thirty four pages. Plus that is only half of the dungeon as another five Levels and another six hundred locations are detailed in the second part, Stonehell Dungeon: Into the Heart of Hell. This sounds like an awful lot and an awful lot in relatively few pages. The question is, how does it manage to do what sounds like an all but impossible task?

Stonehell Dungeon does this by using the one-page dungeon format—best seen in the One-Page Contest—designed to fit a complete, compact adventure on a single page which a Labyrinth Lord can read and prepare in a few minutes before running it for her players in a session (or two). Thus the Labyrinth Lord has to pack in the monsters, the treasure, the puzzles, the traps, and the story into as tight a space as possible and it still offer a high degree of playability. Now the design of Stonehell Dungeon does not strictly adhere to the one-page dungeon format, but the fact that it does is not without its consequences, both good and bad,

Since Stonehell Dungeon is a megadungeon, it cannot simply fit one level into the one-page dungeon format, so instead it divides each level into four quadrants, each of which receives not the one-page dungeon treatment, but a double-page spread treatment—twice. The first of these highlights the salient features and nature of the quadrant with an overview, a description of its population, special dungeon notes, important NPCs, and any new monsters, spells, or magic items. This is the main body of the text for the quadrant, for the second double-page spread gives a map of the quadrant, tables for elements such as wandering monsters and random crypt contents, lists its notable features, and then provides a room key for all of the quadrant’s notable locations. This last feature is highly economical with its words, according each or location no more than three sentences each—and rarely that. What is this means that Stonehell Dungeon manages to pack in descriptions—thumbnail descriptions, but descriptions nonetheless—of thirty to forty rooms in just over page! 

Now what the room descriptions do not include are any monster stats. These are are included in a double-page spread given for the level and all four of its quadrants as a whole. This double-page spread shows the four quadrant maps together as a whole so that the Labyrinth Lord can see their connection and this is accompanied by an overview of the level as a whole and a full monster list for the level, including their stats. What this means is that the Referee is not going to be running Stonehell Dungeon from just the double-page spread of the quadrant map and room list, but will still need to refer to the overviews of both the quadrant and the level. That said, the format means that this cross-referencing is kept to a minimum and with a printout of the monster list to hand the Labyrinth Lord could just work from just the double-page spread of the quadrant map and the room list.

What this means is that Stonehell Dungeon can be run with the minimum of fuss, quadrant by quadrant, level by level. Even preparation is relatively light, since the quadrants, for the most part, are fairly self-contained, with little overlap from quadrant to another, though there is some overlap in the deeper levels. This almost compartmentalisation means that it is relatively easy for the Labyrinth Lord excise a quadrant from Stonehell Dungeon and run it elsewhere or on its own. On the downside, it means that the story and the narrative in the dungeon can also become compartmentalised because the connections between individual quadrants are also limited. Now to be fair, there are story and plot elements in Stonehell Dungeon mostly through the hooks which pull the adventurers into the dungeons, but this being a dungeon for the Old School Renaissance, there is less of an emphasis upon plot and more on what the players and their characters bring to the adventure and dungeon.

As to the plot and rationale of Stonehell Dungeon, it is a former prison, a penal solution for a tyrant some three centuries ago who had too many enemies and not enough gaol space. Begun as an experiment, the tyrant fed in more and more prisoners who had to dig and expand its confines in order to make space. The prison was also self-governing, the guards only there to prevent escapes and as ever greater numbers have been forced in, a malign society of rival gangs was formed. When the tyrant and his regime was overthrown, the prison was abandoned, few escaped, and the limited reform or rescue teams sent in, never returned. Those who remained went mad and many descended into cannibalism as something seemed to feed on and exacerbate the madness and later spread Chaos… In the centuries since Stonehell Dungeon was abandoned, it has been a base for bandits and brigands, a destination for adventurers, and more. Today, its location is well-known, lying at the far end of a gorge when the ruins of the prison’s fortifications and above ground facilities now stand. Together, these serve as Level 0 for the dungeon.

Beyond the abandoned and explored and re-explored opening ‘Hell’s Antechamber’ inside Stonehell Dungeon’s entrance, once the adventurers are in, there is the neutral ground of a Kobold Village of dungeon caretakers to be found, a Hobgoblin army preparing for conquest, a Dwarf on an architectural survey expedition to be joined, a former serpentine temple which adds an element of Cosmic Horror, an asylum, Wererat mercenaries and spies, a ghost funeral skiff whose crew are still looking looking to take away the dead—and the not-so-dead, whilst the laboratory of the Plated Mage and a strange alien race push Stonehell Dungeon into weird Science Fantasy territory. Not all of this is all that interesting, in general, barring the Kobold Village, any section involving races like Orcs and Hobgoblins feels like they have to be there in order to counterpoint the odder and more interesting aspects of Stonehell Dungeon where the author has been freer with his imagination. Even then, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls is not as weird as it could be, for there are another five levels to come in Stonehell Dungeon: Into the Heart of Hell, and even by the fifth level of the dungeon, very little of weirdness has been touched upon. Of course, if the Labyrinth Lord decides to end the megadungeon playthrough there, it does end with a confrontation with a very well handled monster.

Physically, Stonehell Dungeon is a surprisingly slim book given what it provides. It is lightly illustrated, primarily with publicly available artwork. The writing and editing are generally decent, though the near adherence to the one-page dungeon format does mean that the content feels cramped in places. Another issue is that in the overview pages, elements are typically discussed before their placement in the room lists for each quadrant, so Labyrinth Lord will need to get used to that format rather than the sequential format of other adventures and campaigns.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls is not necessarily the perfect example of a megadungeon to come out of the Old School Renaissance, but it is undeniably a good one. It offers the means to use the stripped back mechanics beloved of the Old School Renaissance which leave room for the Labyrinth Lord’s and her players’ own rulings and input respectively. As much as it is representative of the Old School Renaissance, it is equally of another aspect of the hobby—that nothing new goes out of print. Stonehell Dungeon was published in 2009 and Print on Demand means that a decade on it is still available.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls manages to achieve control of its content via the one-page dungeon format which prevents it from sprawling unnecessarily, which means that it is easier for the Labyrinth Lord to run the megadungeon quadrant by quadrant. Yet at the same time that format places constraints upon its storytelling possibilities and perhaps plots that all too often fight to escape beyond their quadrants. Overall, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls is an incredible piece of design, economical of format and word count in a way which helps the Labyrinth Lord run the dungeon off the page.

Perilously Large

The MegaDungeon in Dungeons & Dragons is not just a dungeon, but a dungeon that is large enough, deep enough, ecologically viable enough, and has plots enough to support an entire campaign. The classic example is 1991’s The Ruins of Undermountain for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, and it has been revisited in subsequent editions of the RPG again and again. For the Old School Renaissance, perhaps the best known example is Dwimmermount, James Maliszewski’s love letter to the concept designed for use with Goblinoid Games’ Labyrinth Lord. The most recent addition to the large dungeon concept is Castle Gargantua. Now Castle Gargantua is as big as its title suggests, but not only is it as different as those megadungeons that have come before it, it is also different all but each and every time.

Published by Kabuki Kaiser for use with Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying—but compatible with other retroclones, Castle Gargantua is subtitled “A grotesque gothic horror megadungeon that’s never the same twice”. Yet it is not strictly speaking, a megadungeon. For Castle Gargantua is not actually a dungeon, but rather a tower, though a tower of immense proportions, being the same height as the Empire State Building and having the same floor space as as Ceausescu's Palatul Poporului in Bucharest or the entire old city of Venice. Yet it is also ‘gargantuan’ because its original inhabitants were not normal humanoids, but rather giants and thus the internal dimensions are scaled to a far larger size such that each map square is not ten foot square, but sixty feet square!

Castle Gargantua is also different because it has long since ceased to be home to either the original occupants or the original designer, and indeed the dungeon never quite specifically identifies either. Further, its halls and corridors have long since been emptied and plundered several times over of the monsters and riches once found there. Instead, the castle is home to adventurers, explorers, treasure hunters, bandits, and more who have come to the complex for reasons of their own and found themselves trapped and forced to adapt, in turn becoming new threats and factions indigenous to certain parts of the castle. Other dangers lie in the magics and chaos that lingers from the day of the castle’s founding, warping the ordinary and the trivial into the grotesque and the gruesome, both elements that run rampant in Castle Gargantua.

Just eight locations, each consisting of between six and eight rooms, are described in Castle Gargantua. Each is beautifully mapped by Dyson Logos and is comprised of a little pre-generated mini-adventure where the player characters might encounter the grotesque, the mysterious, the weird, the fantastic, themselves—and worse!  The rest of the megadungeon is something that the Dungeon Master will create as the game proceeds, from the moment that the player characters open Castle Gargantua’s enormous front doors until they reach until they reach the ‘end’, the final encounter. Instead of working from a map, the Dungeon Master works from a five-by-seven grid of squares known as The Big Picture. In fact, the players themselves will be creating the map because it is all based upon the Dungeon Master’s rolls and description  rather than his paraphrasing of pre-written material.

The squares are divided into five different colours—Blood, Gold, Lust, Stone, and Wine. Each square consists of between four and six rooms and connecting corridors and stairs, the number and type of exits between them, the size and type of room or chamber, and the contents of the room or chamber, including treasures, monsters, weirdness, traps, and atmospheric details being generated on the fly by the Dungeon Master as the player characters move from one room to the next, using the tables provided. There several sets of these tables, one each for Blood, Lust, Stone, and Wine squares, the Gold squares being the reserve of the special, pre-generated encounters. Each of the other four colours and their associated squares have their particular theme or environment. Blood squares are violent locations filled with the dead and the undead; Lust squares are wild places, horny with rampant desire; Stone squares are the most dungeon like, filled with a deep dungeon halls, weird architecture, and grim corridors; and Wine squares are places of alcohol sodden revels distorted by madness. The contents of these tables match their themes, so Bacchus, Murderous Revelers, and Wine Puddings will be encountered in Wine squares, whereas Cursed Chastity Belts, Houris, and a Monstrous Angora Cat will be found in Lust squares. There is also a long list of room types, such as Barracks, Charnel Ground, Fissure, Jail Cell, Ossuary, Taxidermy Laboratory, and more, for each environment  that the Dungeon Master can cross off as he uses them so that no room type can be used more than is necessary—so there might be more than one Battlefield, but only the one Zoo for example.

Upon entering through the giant front doors of Castle Gargantua—they are not the only entrance to the castle, but the other will only apparent upon exploring inside—the player characters will find themselves on square one of The Big Picture. Once they have explored the four or more rooms of the square, then the Dungeon Master rolls a six-sided die and moves the party that number of spaces along The Big Picture. Some of the squares are marked with the Clubs symbol and an arrow that leads back down The Big Picture. If the player characters land on one of these squares, then after they have explored the square, the next exit they take leads down the arrow. The supplement even goes so far as to describe this as like a game of ‘Snakes & Ladders’, though there no ‘ladders’ as such. Each time that the player characters lands on a Clubs square, they are always going to go down the ‘snake’ or ‘arrow’ to a Gold square and a pre-generated encounter. 

Whilst it is possible to play each square one after another in sequential order, the default method of rolling the die and moving the player characters gives Castle Gargantua a more organic, interwoven structure, with seemingly unlinked parts of the castle in reality connected by secret doors and tunnels. It also means that because the types of squares that are played through is determined randomly, a play through of Castle Gargantua is going to be different from the previous one and the next one. Of course there are only twelve options for the types of monsters, weirdness, and traps for each environment, and only seven Gold locations, so there is not an infinite number of possibilities for each environment. Yet there are enough given that the Dungeon Master could run Castle Gargantua more than once for his players if he wanted to.

Although Castle Gargantua is designed to run using Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, it definitely feels more suited to the latter than the former. Not only because it makes reference to the real world, but because of its weirdness and the often uncaringly arbitrary nature of that weirdness. The sense of unreality to Castle Gargantua is enforced by several factors. First, there is its sense of inhuman scale. Second, there is its seemingly ability to wrap back upon itself via the use of The Big Picture. Third, there is the fact that Castle Gargantua refrains from using the standard types of monsters and treasures found in Dungeons & Dragons-style RPGs. The author instead uses individually designed creatures, NPCs, and treasures that strengthen the off kilter atmosphere of Castle Gargantua and divorce the megadungeon from the superficiality of those traditional elements. Fourth, and finally, Castle Gargantua is infused with the gothic, the gruesome, and the grotesque inspired by the works of the French Renaissance writer, François Rabelais, whose work was noted for wild and absurd, sometimes satirical fantasy.

Physically, Castle Gargantua is well presented. The cartography is excellent, the writing clear, and larger font size will make it easier to use during play. The illustrations are slightly odd, but this is in keeping with the tone and feel of the dungeon as a whole. Given the tone of both the content and the artwork, it does mean that Castle Gargantua is better suited for a mature audience, especially with the inclusion of the Lust theme. Admittedly, it does clearly state this in that section and anyway, it is written with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying in mind. That also does mean that content of Castle Gargantua may be too odd and too over the top for an audience that is more used to Labyrinth Lord rather than Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying.

The truth of the matter is that Castle Gargantua is not going to be to everyone's taste, the likelihood it being too weird for a broad audience. Nevertheless it maintains its off kilter tone throughout, despite being more of a toolkit than the linear dungeon more commonly seen. The tools in this kit keep the running of this dungeon simple and straightforward, easing the otherwise challenging task of running a dungeon with the minimum of preparation. With Castle Gargantua, the Dungeon Master has the well-presented means to create an eerie, creepy experience on the go.