Dungeon Robber rules ready to download

July 11th, 2012

Here are the beta rules for Dungeon Robber, the solo board game played on the Random Dungeon Generator poster. (If you don’t have a poster, buy one now!)

I’d describe Dungeon Robber as the next evolution of D&D. It’s important because it has an open playtest, and tons of optional “modules” for changing the game experience. Wow! Download it now!

DOWNLOAD DUNGEON ROBBER

Play it! Test it! Send feedback to me, paul, at blog of holding!

Play Yourself

One of my favorite of the optional Dungeon Robber rules is “Play Yourself” mode, where you stat yourself up by answering a series of highly scientific questions (do you have all your wisdom teeth? Then you have high Wisdom!) and, unprepared as you are, enter the dungeon. I like it because it speaks to one of the central D&D fantasies.

What would you do if you – you yourself – found yourself at the dark entrance of a D&D dungeon?

Smart money’s on turning around and going home. But if I were feeling bold, I might take a sword from the skeletal hand of a dead guardian (not that I know how to use a sword), light a torch, and creep into the quiet labyrinth. I wouldn’t be looking to explore the whole thing. I’d just be looking to see if I could find a souvenir: a nice statue, or a few gold coins. Guys, gold is selling at $1600 per ounce now. That means a single gold piece is worth about $600 (or $3000 if it’s one of those big 1e ten-to-a-pound coins). Even the faded tapestries that D&D parties routinely ignore are probably worth something, or at least would look nice in my Brooklyn apartment.

With every room I entered, I’d be pressing my luck, because I, Paul, am no match for even a level 1 monster. The first time I saw a kobold’s whisker, I’d flee – and hope I remembered the way out.

Of course, this isn’t how D&D does dungeoncrawls. D&D takes all of the scary trappings of a haunted house – monsters, vampires, traps – and lets you and your well-armed friends punch them in the face. It’s like you’re a squad from a World War II movie that wandered into a horror film.

Dungeon Robber is a fear-drenched, cowardly, haunted house, press-your-luck dungeoncrawl. It uses lightly-abstracted D&D rules, with more emphasis on the OD&D fleeing rules than on combat. In an RPG, the level of rule detail lets you know what you should be doing. In OD&D, there’s a lot of rules about fleeing: your chances for losing pursuit by turning corners, passing through doors, and dropping food are specified. In Dungeon Robber, I tried to preserve those rules.

Dungeon Robber is a board game, so you can win or lose. You win if you retire alive and rich. If you retire richer than someone else, you’re more of a winner than they are. But really, if you survive your plunge into the dungeon, however brief, you’ve won.

Let me know about your experiences playing Dungeon Robber! Did you emerge with a handful of silver pieces? Were you killed by a rat? Did you retire with enough money to buy a kingdom?

DOWNLOAD DUNGEON ROBBER

Posted in legacy D&D, other systems, RPG Hub | 9 Comments »

D&D is old-school, Chainmail is new-school

July 9th, 2012

OD&D? Pah! The REAL Fantasy game is Chainmail. And it is way ahead of its time. Here’s why.

As a new-school D&D player, there’s a lot of D&D history I’ve missed. Editing Cheers Gary, gaming with Mike Mornard, and illustrating the AD&D Dungeon Generator have helped, but there’s a lot in D&D that I still don’t understand. I’m going back to the OD&D texts to see whether they can help my new-school game. Right now, I’m reading Chainmail.

Chainmail has Dice Pools. When you attack some Light Foot with your Medium Horse, you roll 2d6 per horseman, and you get a success (kill) on a 5 or a 6. The dice pool mechanic wouldn’t be seen again until Shadowrun in ’89.

Chainmail has ascending Armor Class. Sort of. Chainmail man-to-man combat is run by crossindexing things on matrixes. On the melee table, there are headings for the different types of armor (No Armor through Plate Mail and Shield). On the Missile Fire table, the armor types are replaced with ascending numbers: 1 for No Armor, 2 for Leather, up to 8 for Plate Armor and Shield.

Chainmail has at-will spells. There are no spellpoints or rules for Vancian casting in Chainmail. A wizard can throw a fireball once a turn, if he likes.

Chainmail has rules for counterspells – and they’re simple: when an enemy wizard casts a spell, roll a target number on 2d6 to counter it. D&D 3e had counterspell rules that no one ever used because they involved readying an action. I don’t think any other edition has counterspells as part of the core rules.

Chainmail has rules for spell failure. A weak wizard (a seer) can try to cast a difficult spell – they just have a chance of failure. This was taken out of D&D, and generations of fans have tried to houserule it back in.

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treasure from Venus

July 6th, 2012

“Ruins. Cyclopean, strange, and alien in contour, half-destroyed shapes of stone were blurred against a dim background.” What’s waiting for us on Venus, according to Henry Kuttner’s science fiction story “Beauty and the Beast”, is a D&D dungeon crawl setting.

No dungeon crawl is complete without treasure. In “Beauty and the Beast”, astronauts find a jewel: “Oval, large as an egg, the gem flamed gloriously in the light of the electric torch. It had no color, and yet seemed to partake of all the hues of the spectrum.” Even more valuable, though, are the flowers that surround the ruins. “The new flowers had proved tremendously popular, and florists demanded them avidly. Lovelier than orchids they were, and they did not fade for a long time after being cut.”

If PCs travel to Venus and find beautiful flowers surrounding empty ruins, they probably won’t think to sell them to florists. If they do, they might get rich. They might also (spoilers ahead) plant the seeds of the destruction of civilization.

The egg-sized jewel turns out to be an egg (a classic D&D treasure trick). It hatches a Venusian, who, too late, tries to warn humanity about the beautiful flowers: “And now, the flowers grow on Earth. In a month, the petals will fall, and from the blossoms the virus will develop. And then, all life on Earth will be destroyed, as it was on Venus, and nothing will exist on all the planet but bright flowers and the ruins of cities. I must warn them to destroy the blossoms now, before they pollinate…”

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drow are from the 18th century

July 4th, 2012

July 4th is a time for Americans to celebrate the Founding Fathers, and what better way than with a discussion of the DROW?

Visually, what’s the most interesting thing about drow? Is it the ebony skin, which lures cosplayers into racially complicated situations? No! It is the WHITE HAIR.

Costume-wise, perfectly white hair usually implies powdered wigs, which imply, in turn, the 18th century: the founding fathers, Mozart, Marie Antoinette. What if we used the 18th century aesthetic to inform our concept of the drow?

While the United States’ national story has the Founding Fathers as unequivocal heroes, most everyone else in a powdered wig is creepy in some way: bad old King George! Debauched Mozart! Sinister Salieri! that creepy guy from Dangerous Liaisons!

Drow actually make a fine addition to this creepy collection. Therefore, drow should probably wear silk jackets and high heeled boots. They should carry sword sticks (that crumble if exposed to sunlight). Their beauties – men and women both – have white beauty marks. The drow attend masques and balls in which they exchange innuendo and assassinate their rivals. (Drow dances, like those of Melnibone, are to the well-tempered screams of tortured slaves.) Drow attitude to non-drow is a heightened parody of the pitiless indifference of French nobility for the lower orders.

Furthermore, drow worship Lolth, the Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Here’s a statue of her from Pax East 2012.

Throw a dress on her, and her silhouette reminds me of another queen, also famous for her indifference to the lower orders:

How to use drow in your campaign:

Make them charming. Witty, even. Have them take snuff. Play harpsichord music as background music when they’re around. They can be just as diabolical, unfeeling, and sinister as ever – more so, even.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

stories from Mike Mornard’s game table

July 2nd, 2012

In my OD&D campaign DMed by Mike Mornard, I’m sort of the Chief Inquisitor – the guy who’s most likely to bog down the game with questions about Gary Gygax’s and Dave Arneson’s games.

Usually I try to organize such reminiscences into coherent articles, like “this is the one about player skill” or “this is the one about henchmen”. Sometimes pieces don’t fit into a narrative. So: this is the one with a list of random stories.

Monster PCs: Could you play monsters in OD&D? Sure! Mike played an 8th level balrog at one point. Mike related a story of a roleplaying session in which the party had to distract a wizard. Mike’s balrog came to the door wearing an asbestos press hat, claiming to be from the Balrog Times. He made fire flash from his thumb to simulate camera flashes. He not only distracted the fame-hungry wizard but got a guided tour of his mansion. Mike finished the story with the a refrain common to participants in an immersive role-playing session: “and we didn’t roll dice once.”

Setting your Friends on Fire: Our (well, mostly Tavis’s) frequent misadventures with flaming oil prompted this story: Once in Greyhawk, Mike and the gang were fighting mummies. Mike and another player planned to coordinate their actions: one would throw oil on the mummy, and the other would torch him. Before their turns came up, Mike was jostled. A bad die roll later, and Mike spilled his oil on Ernie. A moment later, the other player was jostled, and he accidentally hit an oil-soaked Ernie with his torch. (I’d like to know: what were the mechanics behind this? Natural 1s?)

Undead level drain: A lot of people hate the fact that undead permanently drain levels: in fact, that’s been removed from D&D’s recent editions. Mike told us that, at first, undead level drain was impermanent. Unless you died of level drain, you’d regain your levels through healing. During playtesting, Gary decided that undead were insufficiently frightening, and made the level drain permanent.

In fact, Gary and the others were surprised when so many people hated the undead level drain. People didn’t like that it made you a level behind the rest of your party. In Gary’s game, because of the Greyhawk campaign’s intense schedule and huge player base, that was not as big a deal as it was for most gaming groups. In Greyhawk, players and characters were always leaving and joining the party, a different mix in every session, and they’d typically be anywhere from 3 to 5 levels apart.

If a 5th level party had some level 1 characters in it, they’d stop on level 1, find some goblins, and let the level 1 characters fight them. Once they’d faced some danger – earning their XP – the group would go down to level 3, and the level 1 characters would stand on the inside of the party holding torches. They’d get to share the XP from the mission because they’d faced some combat earlier. Mike doesn’t know how this practice evolved: it was already in place when he joined the game.

Fast-leveling PCS: Since you got XP from money, the Greyhawk players would fast-level characters by giving them all the loot from the adventure. When Mike suggested we give all the loot to the first-level cleric to level him to 2, it blew my mind.

Although this is possible under the XP rules, I’ve never seen this practiced, or suggested, in 1e games. In Greyhawk, they did this all the time.

Subsystems: When D&D was being invented, people didn’t mind the fact that every piece of the game had its own subsystem. As Mike says, “We liked rolling dice.” They also didn’t mind consulting charts. Charts and unique subsystems were respected pieces of wargaming tradition. Some of the D&D mechanics, in fact, are direct evolutions from war games.

The use of 1d6 for a morale roll was used in some 60s war games. The problem was that such a roll was very granular, and made for a steep curve. Gary switched to 2d6 to allow for finer gradations.

Gary’s experimentations with multiple dice to produce bell curves are, in many ways, central to D&D. He must have been extra frustrated one day when he saw that Mornard and someone else were playing a game where one was using 2d6 and one was using 1d12 for morale. Gary just shook his head (and presumably gave a lecture on probability).

Character death: As a new-school player, one of the speed bumps I hit when trying to understand OD&D was the attitude towards character death. Perhaps because the Greyhawk players were coming from war games, they didn’t mind the occasional arbitrary death, even if it was inflicted by another player.

Mike told a story of a wizard played by Ernie Gygax. Mike doesn’t know the character’s name because people usually called the character “Ernie’s Wizard”. He found a powerful magic item, possibly called “the Orb of Cleric” (not an item I’ve heard of, but maybe Mike can clarify). Tom Champeny’s character was a cleric and wanted it. He offered to buy it, gave Ernie presents, etc. Finally, out in the wilderness one day, he cast Finger of Death on Ernie and took it. No one got upset: 13-year-old Ernie was like, “oh well, guess i should have given it to you.” (Ernie’s Wizard’s henchmen got him resurrected.)

Nevertheless, screwing each other over was only a sometimes activity. In Greyhawk, players tended towards neutrality. If your high-level character died, they’d usually get you resurrected. In Blackmoor, on the other hand, your body would be looted before it hit the ground.

What do hit points represent? Over the years, there have been a lot of ex post facto justifications for hit points, some by Gygax himself. In the end, as Mike says, “hit points are something to make combat go the way Gary wanted.” That’s a good thing to remember next time you find yourself tempted to jump in an internet argument about the subject.

Posted in legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

biker gangs in the dungeon

June 29th, 2012

Peter S. Beagle’s Folk of the Air, about a Society for Creative Anachronism chapter where MAGIC IS REAL, is much less well-known than The Last Unicorn. Although it takes place in California, it still has a few details for your dungeon.

…along corridors they could not see, around certain doubtful corners that had to be caught up with before they could be turned, and through high, transparent outlines, the color of abandoned spiderwebs, cold to make the blood ache.

Of all these dungeon details, my favorite is the corner that you have to catch. I assume that it moves ahead down a seemingly-endless corridor, at your speed or at the speed of a jogging human, whichever is slower.

It might be cool to have a couple of these moving turns, set to different speeds. One is uncatchable by even the fastest runner. But in another part of the dungeon is a MOTORCYCLE.

I once played in a game which featured motorcycles in a dungeon. It’s great because they’re so fast and aggressive, but their speed is so badly suited for winding corridors. Most of a biker gang will be wiped out by dungeon walls. D&D motorcycles should obviously be ridden by skeletons.

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download the original random dungeon generator

June 28th, 2012

Today, Wizards offers a PDF of the Random Dungeon Generation section of the first edition DMG. Download the PDF! And then celebrate by buying my poster!

Kickstarter stretch goal news: I’ve got the board game rules for Dungeon Robber in pretty good shape, and will probably release a beta version next week.

Posted in news, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

cantrips for every class

June 27th, 2012

4th edition classes have been accused of feeling a little “samey” in combat, but there’s more to classes than combat. Or there should be.

Take the 4e wizard. This is an example of a well-designed out-of-combat class. In noncombat scenes, they generally feel like wizards. A huge part of the credit goes to cantrips. When you’re using Prestidigitation to make something disappear and Mage Hand to drop it into your pocket, all without making a single die roll, you feel like an all-powerful wizard. The class design complements the flavor nicely.

Compare that to the Ardent class from PHB 3. I tried an Ardent; I was reasonably interested by the premise of an emotionally explosive brain-warper who clouds men’s minds. The class flavor promised that, but outside of combat, the mechanics didn’t deliver. The only relevant class feature I got was a +2 to allies’ social skill checks. Now, I played that up as much as I could: instead of saying, “Remember that I give you +2 to Diplomacy” I said, “Richard Ink waves his hands and feelings of wellbeing fill the room. You get a +2 to diplomacy.” That can only go so far: that’s me working to support the flavor, not the mechanics of the class working to support the flavor as they do with the wizard. The Ardent badly needs a cantrip-like ability or two to give it an emotional niche besides “cleric who uses the Psionic power source”.

Really, every class could benefit from archetype-defining non-combat abilities. They’re a little hard to imagine for melee classes, but every magic-using class (arcane and divine definitely, and possibly primal) should get the noncombat fun that the wizard gets from cantrips.

You know what else is cool about wizard cantrips? There is no die rolling. They always work. The wizard doesn’t have to depend on the DM: the DM doesn’t get to set DCs or say whether something worked or not. Cantrips are small ways that the wizard has mastery over the DM’s game world.

So here’s what I want to do. Every class will get at least one little cantrip-like trick. Wizards are among the most magical classes, and have three cantrips. Most classes will probably have two. Martial classes might only get one. The cantrips will have the following characteristics:

  • They will have primarily out-of-combat effects. Their effects should be, on the whole, minor; but characters may be able to use them cleverly to good effect.
  • They will not require a d20 roll. A character should be able to predictably succeed when using a cantrip.
  • Using a cantrip should support the reason that people play the class.

CLERIC
Most people play the cleric because the group needs a healer. Putting that aside, though, people who actually enjoy playing the cleric tend to like giving out buffs and talking about their deity. A cleric’s cantrips should enable these behaviors.
-SYMBOL As a minor action, the cleric may make their god’s symbol glow from their palm or holy symbol. It disappears at the end of the cleric’s next turn. Sustain minor. Only a true cleric of a god can make the god’s symbol perfectly. It can be faked by illusion, but such fakery can be automatically discovered by anyone trained in Religion.
-BLESS The cleric touches an object or or a willing ally with their Symbol cantrip. The mark of the god will appear on the object or creature. If an intelligent creature sees the mark and knowingly kills the creature or destroys the object, they take 5 radiant damage (10 at cleric level 11 and 15 at level 21).

A cleric may maintain one simultaneous Blessing per level. The cleric can end any Blessing at any time. All of a cleric’s Blessings end when he or she falls unconscious or takes an extended rest.

PALADIN
People who play the Paladin usually want to be virtuous – sometimes obnoxiously so. A paladin will be happy if his cantrips support the paladin’s code while causing potential inconvenience to his party.
-VOW The paladin makes a promise. The hearer has total confidence that the the paladin is bound to his word. If the paladin willingly or unwillingly breaks his word, he suffers Shaken Faith, which gives the effects of resurrection sickness, until he has reached 2 milestones. While in Shaken Faith, the paladin may not make Vows and is generally broody.
-TAME As a standard action, a paladin may tame any adjacent creature with the Mount keyword of the paladin’s level or lower. The creature cannot be currently ridden by another rider. Such a creature instantly becomes a rideable ally of the paladin. As a minor action, the paladin may command it telepathically while it is within one mile. The paladin may only Tame one creature at a time. If a new creature is Tamed, a previously Tamed creature is released from the effect.

WARLOCK
People play the warlock because they want to act creepy and slightly evil. A warlock’s cantrips should make everyone nervous.
-SUMMON As a standard action, the warlock may summon a Tiny lesser creature belonging to their patron, as appropriate for pact – devil, fairie, alien. Sustain minor. The creature can make no attacks and has defenses equal to the caster’s. If the creature is hit, the caster loses a surge and the creature disappears. The creature has a fly speed of 5, and skills equal to the summoner. The creature may travel up to 10 squares away from the caster. The creature can communicate telepathically with the caster.
-BURN As a minor action, the warlock may ignite any unattended flammable object within 5 squares. Nonflammable objects become uncomfortably hot.
-EVIL EYE As a standard action, a warlock may fix a malignant stare upon any creature within 20 squares within line of sight. That creature will be under the Evil Eye until the end of the caster’s next turn or until the creature gets out of line of sight of the warlock. A creature under the Evil Eye feels physically uncomfortable and takes a -2 penalty to all skill checks. On a natural 1 on any check, a creature under the Evil Eye fails spectacularly: the DM should make up a critical failure penalty. Minor persists. At eleventh level, a warlock may have two subjects under this effect – one with each eye. This creeps everyone out.

FIGHTER
People play the fighter because a) they want to be a skilled, canny, defensive warrior or b) they want to do a lot of damage and don’t know about the barbarian class. Slayers are a little different, but it doesn’t hurt to give them the same abilities.
-SIZE UP: A fighter can tell what level enemies are, and whether they are minions, elite, or solo. In combat, it takes a standard action. If opponents are specifically trying to hide their true abilities, they must make a Bluff check. Fighters get a +5 on their Insight vs. this bluff.

RANGER
The deal with rangers is that they can track. Although the Ranger class description mentions their tracking abilities, they have no tracking class features to back it up. Furthermore, the Nature skill doesn’t even mention tracking. Perhaps WOTC was intentionally divorcing the ranger class from its “Aragorn” history: but what wotc has put asunder, let us join together.
-TRACK: The Ranger can determine the number and kind of creatures who have passed in the last day, and follow their trail. If the targets are hiding their trail, they make an opposed Nature check: otherwise, the ranger automatically succeeds, regardless of weather and conditions. At level 11, the ranger can track trails up to a week old; at level 21, a month old.

WARLORD
The Warlord desperately needs some abilities that let them lead an army.
-DRILLING: By putting allies through a course of martial lessons, a Warlord can permanently increase their combat abilities. Able-bodied creatures capable of bearing arms, of less than the Warlord’s level, may be drilled. Untrained but able-bodied civilians become level 1 monsters. Other creatures gain a level, up to the Warlord’s level. Once a creature has been given a level by a warlord once, it cannot gain a second in this way.

Unless otherwise specified, gaining a level grants extra HP (typically 8, but dependent on role), and +1 to defenses, attack, and damage.

The Warlord can train five beings a week at level 1, 50 a week at level 11, and 500 a week at level 21.

ROGUE
The player of a rogue wants his character to be a movie star.
-IMPLAUSIBLE ESCAPE: Whenever a rogue dies off-screen (not witnessed by any intelligent creature), he is not really dead. He can rejoin the party at a suitably dramatic moment, at half his hit points, as soon as he comes up with an unlikely explanation for how he survived.

One of the effects of this is that rogues who scout far enough ahead can’t be killed (permanently) by traps. They are, however, still vulnerable to most monsters. Furthermore, a rogue who’s close to death is best served by jumping into a dark pit.

Posted in 4e D&D, game design, RPG Hub | 17 Comments »

art by gygax and arneson

June 25th, 2012

(Today I’m talking about the art of OD&D, so this post is NSFW inasmuch as you think the OD&D art is NSFW.)

During a D&D game with Mike Mornard, we got to talking about the art in the original Little Brown Books and the Greyhawk supplement.

Greg Bell is listed as one of the illustrators in the original books. You can recognize Greg Bell pics by the blocky outlines.

It seems that Greg copied the compositions of a lot of his pieces from comics of the time: for instance, I bet this picture started its life as a Conan the Barbarian splash page.

But hey – Greg was a teenager drawing pictures for a friend’s semi-amateur zine. I don’t think we need to hold him to super high standards here.

Mike Mornard says that, at the time, he hated Greg Bell’s pictures and asked Gary why he was using so many of the illustrations. “Because Greg works for $2 a picture,” said Gary.

Mike disliked the Bell artwork so much that he went off and recruited an artist who, he believed, could do better: David Sutherland. Mike met David at a Society for Creative Anachronism meeting, saw his drawings, and told him to get in touch with Gary Gygax.

Sutherland’s art, of course, became a staple of early TSR work. He drew the adventurers that inspired my dungeon map poster. He also drew a lot of naked ladies. Here are two David Sutherland succubi.

Mornard told us that the body of one of these original succubi was copied from a Playboy centerfold. If I were truly dedicated to D&D history, I would no doubt look through early 70s centerfolds to find the original. I will leave that research project up for grabs.

Speaking of nudity, there were a lot of naked-lady monsters in Oe and 1e. They’re often recalled fondly (and only barely creepily) by guys I know who played D&D as kids. A lot of these pieces are by Darlene. Here’s Darlene’s succubus, this time in a sort of Baroque odalisque pose instead of a Playboy pose:

Mike Mornard mentioned that another of the naked-lady pieces from the original book was by a female artist, and that it arrived unsolicited in the mail:

It’s interesting that more than half of the nude women of OD&D are by female artists. I have no conclusions I can draw from this, except that it seems that the indie geek scene of the 70s is different from the one I’m familiar with.

Another artist whose OD&D work has always fascinated me is Keenan Powell:

Keenan Powell’s amateur, almost outsider-art pictures set the tone, for me, for the OD&D aesthetic. The whole book gives the feeling of being illustrated by gamers who draw pictures, not by artists who play games.

Is Keenan Powell (who’s also a female artist, apparently) the same person who drew the Beautiful Witch and Amazon? I can’t read the signature on the witch illustration.

While we were on the subject of OD&D art, I asked Mike something which had puzzled me for a long time. “Who drew that stone head in the Greyhawk book? And what was that about?”

“I think that was by Gary,” said Mike. And he didn’t know what it was about: it wasn’t one of the things he encountered on his trips through the Greyhawk dungeon. As far as Mike knew, the Enigmatic Stone Head might have been something that Rob Kuntz discovered on one of his solo dungeon escavations.

Furthermore, Mike told us, the Carrion Crawler picture from Greyhawk was by Dave Arneson.

Without hearing it from Mike, I would never have known that these pictures, by the inventors of the game, weren’t by the same hand. I might have attributed them to Keenan Powell. I find it somehow touching that these guys, out of their exubrance and their love of the game (and maybe in an effort to save $2) were inspired to draw and share these pictures.

I’m not a professional artist. When I draw a picture and put it up on the Internet, I sometimes feel like it’s an act of hubris. Maybe it is, but it’s also an act of faith that the world will cut me a break and accept what I can offer. I think that all of these OD&D artists need to be approached on those terms.

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peasants with magic weapons

June 22nd, 2012

A spritely little old fellow sat comfortably on a tree root not fifteen paces off. He was clad in a single garment made from the hide of some unidentifiable and long-dead animal. It covered him from neck to knees and was cinched around the middle with a wide belt with a brass buckle. From it hung several pouches, a double-edged knife, an old silver horn, and a crude but serviceable battle-axe, well-rusted and probably taken from a barrow.
Elizabeth Boyer – The Sword And The Satchel

The obscure corners of the D&D world are brimming with dungeons, barrows, and other ancient treasure caches. Occasionally, a peasant or woodsman will stumble upon a cave and emerge with an ancient, runed +1 sword or axe.

What will a peasant do with such a find? Some will sell it at the next county fair. Others live too far from commerce to find a willing buyer. And, jewels and runes or no, an axe +1 is better at chopping down trees than a regular axe.

This means that occasionally, PCs should find remote peasant families using ancient treasures in their labor. This might be an opportunity for the PCs to buy an item for less than market value, and it may tip the PCs off that there’s a source of ancient treasure nearby.

Here are some other possibilities (roll d20):
1- One of the ancient items is haunted! The peasant will give the PCs the treasure if they will take care of the evil, horse-sized cat in the barn.
2- The peasant is not what he seems! He is a barrow ghost in disguise, and only his magic weapon is undisguised.
3- The peasant is a mighty fighter who wrested the item from ferocious monsters. There are more treasures in the barrow, and more ferocious monsters. The PCs might be outclassed unless they bring the peasant along.
4- The peasant family acquires their treasures by murdering passing adventurers. They suggest that the PCs stay the night, and explore the barrow tomorrow. There is no barrow: the peasants will try to slit the PCs’ throats as they sleep. In the basement are graves.
5- The peasant asks for an exorbitant sum for either the treasure or the location of the ancient barrow.
6- The peasant is willing to sell and will adjust the price according to how big a deal the PCs make about the item.
7- The items are “cursed”: they love their peasant owners. While a PC has one of the items, all paths will bend so as to lead back to the peasants’ farm. Strange coincidences will occur so that the PCs keep meeting the peasants.
8- The item allows you to Turn werewolves using Turn Undead mechanics, and the peasant is afraid to sell it unless the local werewolves are destroyed.
9- The peasant is holding the weapon because it’s one of those ones that will not leave your hand until you kill a foe. The peasant can’t sell it until someone helps him kill a foe: apparently farm animals don’t count.
10- The peasant is waiting to hand off the item to a Chosen One, in accordance to an ancient prophecy about a Red Woman who will arrive from the east. The PCs are not the Chosen Ones, but the peasant is sick of his custodial duties. He keeps hinting to a female PC that she should go have a picnic in the East Pasture, and here, wear this red hat.
11-15: Just an ancient treasure the peasant found in a barrow. There is no more treasure to be found there.
16-20: Just an ancient treasure the peasant found in a barrow. There is more treasure in the barrow, and a guardian monster.

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