The pit

The Telengard campaign I started last year is kaput, dead, over.  I may run it again some time but I’d want to hit the reset button.  I learned a lot DMing it but made a lot of mistakes, not all of them reversible, and have lost a lot of the enthusiasm I had for it.  I might still try to cobble it together into a setting booklet, because the next time I DM my own world it probably be in Telengard, but for now I’m focusing on painting minis and the shared C&C campaign with 5 DMs.

So this, The Pit, was my brilliant One Page Medadungeon — thirteen levels of dungeon, which an enterprising or daring party could access at almost any level, given enough rope.   I posted stuff about it earlier  (also here and here) but wanted to keep the DM tools for it a secret.  Not much need to now.  The guys I game with will have forgotten this post by the time I ever DM Telengard again anyway.

I drew the pit last April (really just an at-a-glance guide more than an actual map), and made up a general encounter table which would give me a sense of what sorts of monsters could appear on a given level, and whenever the party actually entered a cave on a given level, I used whatever was at hand — a Pocketful of Peril, an OPD, or just winging it.  The caves are partly indicated by the little black archways on some levels.  The ‘minotaur’ level was going to have the devious trap/encounter of minotaurs charging out of the caves, which could potentially knock PCs over the edge to be smashed below.

Click to embiggen!

The drawing is pretty crude, I admit, and it doesn’t help that I drew some of it in Sharpie without bothering with so much as a pencil draft.  If I were going to do another one like this, I would probably steal some of Telecanter’s silouettes or maybe scour eBay for some of those old AD&D rub-on transfers.   I colored the tihng with some crayons and markers that were handy.  I drew it on some funky graph paper that has slantwise rules as well as a grid, which helped me keep the ‘road’ somewhat consistent.

The “tables” for it are in this document: the open pit summary. I guess I should mention that my calculations assume that the party is travelling at a B/X rate — 120′ per turn in ‘exploration’ mode.  Not a bad idea, especially on the trap-laden upper leavels, but those random encounters are biatch.  You roll a die based on the ‘segemnt’ or level the party is on and choose a monster from the segment for the roll.  So a random encounter on ‘segment 6′ of the pit (the minotaur/beastmen segment) uses a d8.  A roll of 8 would mean use a monster form segment 8 (a manticore). 

The ‘typical’ monsters should give you a sense of what sort of nasty will be on the level.  Of course you could make up a longer list; in my mind they are just references for the ‘family’ of monsters that could be there.   So the ‘chaos warriors’ segment might include various mutants, evil fighters, and some evil high priests, as well as minor chaos monsters like monsterous hounds, imps, and so on.