Monday, October 28, 2013

Scaled Continent Dungeon #1 - Ready for Players

The sewers of Voltager mapped, stocked, treasured, and a little fleshed out in two nights, and now I'm four days ahead of schedule for first game.  Might work up some templates next.

I'm a bit conflicted on starting level / XP value.  On the one hand, I don't want to build too many low-level dungeons on Voltager, since the mainland is the primary attraction of the setting.  Wilderness adventure more-or-less entails 5th-level for good survival odds, though, so I don't want to hold XP numbers down for long.  On the other hand, having played in a campaign that started at 4th level, it felt too powerful in the beginning.  Two webs and two sleeps a day is great, and then you pull fireball soon after (with a little luck or a scroll).  I'm sort of thinking something like 7500 XP; close enough to 4th that folks will level into it after a decent treasure haul (or already be there for thieves and clerics), but with a gap before they'll probably want to go deep into the jungles.  Good level range to hop between frontier settlements for a while.

High-3rd also seems a reasonable fit for the degree of difficulty that has been baked into this fully-operational battlesta deathtrap dungeon.  When I first ran Sandygates, I was slightly concerned about lethality.  This one doesn't exactly make Sand look like a cakewalk (there are fewer morelocks and less green slime, for starters), but the things in here are nasty in different and exciting ways.  I think the Old Crew could probably handle it OK at this point, but I'm not sure about random FLGS players...  ("It's no Tomb of Horrors, but I'm not as verbose as Gygax anyhow.")

Fortunate side effect of 7500 XP: 6000 GP to spend on important low-level adventuring gear like Reserve XP and Restore Life and Limb castings.

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