This is a bugfix release of Dungeon Robber, but I couldn’t resist throwing in more functionality.

People have been reporting their savegames disappearing, which is bad news. When I was a kid, I didn’t mind my Legend of Zelda save disappearing from the gold Nintendo cartridge, because it meant I got to play more Zelda. But these days I like my savegames to, you know, save. I’d been using the built-in Flash data-saving feature: I’m still using that, but I’m also backing up savegames to HTML5 storage, so each one can act as a backup if the other fails.

Not paranoid enough for you? I also added a “save settings” feature on the loading screen where you can physically make a copy of your Dungeon Robber savegame and save it into a text file or email it to yourself. This lets you import/export your character between multiple computers, and also lets you make sure your fully unlocked town will last forever.

I’ve also added a way to reset your game, if you want to start over from the days when your village had no buildings and your graveyard was empty.

Note: There’s one text error I’ve noticed: in the IMPORT feature, it claims that importing a game will delete the current game. That’s not true: in fact, you can’t import a game over an existing one. You’ll have to torch your village first, before you can import. I’ll update the text when I get home.

I’ve also added a little News section to the loading page, and a link to buy the poster, now that some people are playing the game who don’t follow my blog or kickstarter.

Finally, I’ve made it a little easier to delve down into the dungeon depths. I’ve added 4 inventory slots to every character. That means that you can load up on all the equipment you want and still have room in your pack for the occasional Jacinth of Estimable Beauty or other dungeon treasure.

I still have a long list of bugs to be fixed in an upcoming patch! If you find any new bugs, email me at paul at blogofholding!

It’s my birthday today, and here’s my gift to my readers and kickstarters: the Dungeon Robber video game beta is now available!

I’ve talked before about this game. To recap, it’s a free Flash web game, a final bonus reward to cap the Random Dungeon Generator Kickstarter. It uses the original D&D rules to construct random dungeons and then lets you send in characters to die.

As you may have noticed, I have a tendency to contract featuritis. I always end up jamming a few more things than I planned in all of my projects. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s how this game ended up with pets, extra classes, and the textbook sign of feature creep, a fishing minigame. Well, since then, I’ve added new weapons (including D&D classics like the bastard sword), new treasures, new class abilities, new town buildings, and, based on many hours of alpha testing, new conveniences.

Here’s one: Dungeon dead ends, the curse of any randomly-generated labyrinth, are now semi-safe locations where you can eat food, rest and recover a spell or two, and even send a henchman back to town to sell some of your inventory-clogging vendor trash. All of this comes with a risk. While you’re sitting in the dead end, munching your iron rations and keeping watch down the hallway, you might be ambushed from behind by a monster passing through a secret door.

I’ve also implemented every trick and surprise in the original 1979 random-dungeon charts, including ones which are vanishingly rare. If you happen to find a magic pool that grants wishes in the dungeon, email me and let me know, and tell me what you wished for and how it turned out.

This game has a lot of moving parts, and it’s sure to be buggy. I’d like to hear about any bugs you hit. Also let me know what parts are fun, what parts aren’t, what you found confusing, and what grisly end met your 2nd level Dungeon Robber who somehow found himself on level 7 of the dungeon. My email is paul at blogofholding.com.

And finally, some challenges to you: I’ve been playing this game, in some version or other, for months, and I have never become King. And on the perma-death Advanced mode, my record is even worse. I’ve never made it to level 5, Knight. If you break my records, let me know.

My random forest monster chart includes a bunch of plant monsters, and in the Mearls sidebar game we ran into most of them. Here are the details of the dangerous flora of my elven forest.

Tree of wisdom: This dangerous willow tree is also called a Tree of Death. Elves may seek it in moments of crisis.

Glowing pollen sifts from the tree. Its dim golden halo can be seen 200 feet away at night or 20 feet during the day. There are humanoid and animal bones under the tree, and there may also be treasure (1 chance in 3) and/or passive living creatures (roll d6. 1: normal animal, 2: magical animal, 3: humanoid, 4-6: none).

If you go beneath the tree’s leaves, you feel peaceful and happy. You must make a Wisdom check/save (against enchantment) any time you try to leave the tree, initiate combat, or stand up. If you fail the save, you sit beneath the tree and won’t willingly perform any actions for an hour.

When you first sit down, and after every hour sitting under the tree, you have some spiritual breakthrough (DM: come up with a wise-sounding epigram!) and gain 30 XP.

After six hours spent beneath the tree, you make a death/Will/Wis saving throw (depending on edition). If you succeed, you permanently gain a point of Wisdom. Furthermore, you gain serenity and resolution about a sorrow or dilemma you’re facing. From now on, this tree has no effect on you. If you fail the save, you die.

Red bell ring: – All the trees around a clearing are hung with red bell-shaped flowers. If any creature larger than a fox passes into the ring, or touches a bell, all the bells ring (stealth and invisibility has no effect). The ringing of the bells forces a wandering monster check, prevents surprise, and wakes sleepers (including magical sleepers). Red bells are easy to spot unless you are hurrying.

Cobra vine: You’ve ventured from the path and are wandering through the elven forest. As your foot touches the ground, 2 glowing eyes snap open on an otherwise normal-looking vine. It instantly readies an action to strike (it has the stats of a poisonous snake), at anyone within 10 feet who moves or attacks it. You can try to move out of range slowly enough not to trigger it (5 consecutive rounds of easy dex checks, moving one foot per turn) or try to dodge/attack it (it gets the first attack) or someone outside the range can throw something large enough to distract it (you can escape while it’s attacking something else).

In a previous post, I talked about two awesome TSR campaign settings that never got their own boxed set. 1) Jeff Grubb came up with a world of perpetual cloud where the forces of good had been pushed up to sunny mountain peaks, and cloud ships plied between the mountaintops. 2) Wayne Rossi has pointed out that the implied world of the OD&D books is actually not like any published setting, ever, and has reconstructed a bizarre and wild land of dinosaurs, cavemen, and flying Arthurian knights.

I propose that these two settings be combined, and that it all happen on the classic map from Wilderness Survival: Jeff Grubb’s “forces of good” live in the few hexes of mountain peaks, and the cloudy lowlands are overrun with OD&D Gygaxian weirdness.

These ideas together don’t constitute a full campaign setting. There are a lot of mysteries for us to solve. There were a lot of good suggestions in the comments last time; let’s tackle some new questions.

where do the clouds come from?

I have no idea. The only thing that I’m sure of is that the cloud layer rises a little higher every year, maybe as little as a foot. That gives the mountain peaks a nice doomed Atlantis feel. I like to think that the sages of some mountain peak, preparing for the worst, are building a Babel-like tower on the top of the highest mountain.

The adventurers may well be trying to halt or delay the advance of the clouds. In that case, the source of the clouds determines the kind of adventures the PCs will embark on. If we want to run a megadungeon campaign, the mists are rising up from some unknown source at the bottoms of the dungeons. If we want a mass combat campaign, then the mist is somehow generated by warlords in castles. Maybe the warlords have magic gates to a smoky dimension of fire mercenaries, or maybe the clouds are created by supernatural evil itself.

Or the source of the clouds could be a mystery, or an unexplained given in the campaign world. What do you think?

who lives outside the cities?

In this old post from Swords of Minaria, Evan notices that “The original world, tucked away and hidden in the white box, is one of fierce nomadic bands of humans and humanoids that scour the badlands.” Furthermore, based on the size of the Wilderness Survival map, he calculates that

By terrain type and encounter odds, this indicates the whole map contains an average of 44 large hordes of men and 41 small parties of heroes. Of the hordes, about 17 are bandits, 12 brigands, 7 nomads, 6 berserkers, 2 dervishes, 2 cavemen, 1 buccaneer and 1 group of river pirates. The heroic parties are equal numbers of fighting-men, clerics and magic-users with an average of 8 individuals per party. All told, this indicates there are 7,588 men roaming the countryside.

The wilderness is home to 7,500 human warriors! Whether the settled areas of the Wilderness Survival map are the towns (as in OD&D) or the mountain peaks (as in the Jeff Grubb-inspired setting), the civilized folks probably have far fewer soldiers than that.

It strikes me that, while OD&D presents the world as a battle between Law and Chaos, and Steve Winter mentioned good vs. evil in his cloud-world pitch, this setting is really about farming folk vs. nomads. In this case, the good/lawful guys are the farmers, and they’re losing. The PCs are armed, wandering war bands defending civilization – Seven Samurai fighting their own kind to protect farmers.

What’s up with all the nomads? Are they predominantly evil? Warlike but essentially neutral transhumant pastoralists, escorting their cattle from one grazing land to another? Noble barbarians? A mix? What kind of animals do they herd, and, in this world of dire and flying monsters, what do they ride?

What’s up with the bandits and brigands, two groups which form 2/3 of the wandering bands? Can their numbers possibly be supported by the smaller population of herders and farmers? How do they live? Or are they slowly starving? These questions are relevant for any OD&D White Box campaign, not just a White Box-sky pirates mashup.