Domains at War: Beastman Domain Units

This post sat as a draft in my queue for a looong time, so it may be a little outdated, but a discussion in the Discord brought it to mind so I figured I'd press the Publish button.

Previously, I examined tribal goblins, who due to poor organization and a lousy manufacturing base end up relying very heavily on beast cavalry, scavenged weapons, and unconventional strategy.

But goblins, being weak, are natural candidates for domination by orcs and chaotic domains.  Here I consider the sort of units one might see in a semi-industrialized chaotic domain, Mordor-style.  There's a case to be made that Mordor, in Tolkien, represents the forces of modernity in the mid-20th century, with crude artifice, callous science, and forbidden knowledge applied to slaughter and conquest.  I'm not going to go so far as The Last Ringbearer in apologizing for Sauron - I assume the Dark Lord is probably a bad dude, and his servants likewise.  But evil doesn't mean stupid, and if you have the knowledge and power to train and compel beastmen to forge weapons, their products may be without beauty, but quite functional.

I guess my essential contention is that the primary deficiency of beastmen is organizational, rather than intellectual (of low and evil cunning).  So here I'm assuming a tech-base comparable to humans, but army organization still hampered by the natural aggression of beastmen.

Anyway, starting from the bottom of the totem pole:

Goblins

Goblins benefit greatly from being part of a chaotic domain, primarily because their weaknesses in melee are covered by their stronger counterparts.  They remain useful as cavalry and make for adequate archers.

Goblin Arbalestiers: 1/2/3 IF, AC 2, HD 1-1, UHP 6, ML +0, 2 shortsword 10+, 3 arbalest 10+

Crossbows are great for goblins for the same reasons they were great for human peasants historically: compared to longbows, they're easy to learn to use, they hit hard, and they don't rely on upper-body strength.  Any goblin qualified to use a sling or shortbow could use an arbalest to greater effect, and goblin arbalestiers are available as goblin bowmen.  The arbalest's no-move-before-fire and great range are perfect for low-speed goblins, and if you're at range, having lower HP than orcs is fine.  This frees up fast, tough orcs with carrying capacity for armor to get into the melee where they belong.  It's a win-win.  Wages are about 9gp/mo (cheaper than orcish crossbowmen), company TCO is around 1.5kgp/mo, and their BR is around 1.25.  If your setting has guns, Goblin Musketeers are good for the same reasons.

Goblin Grenadiers: 1/2/3 IF, AC 2, HD 1-1, UHP 6, ML -1, 2 torch 10+, 5 thrown military oil 10+

In addition to advanced metallurgy, Mordorian beastmen have discovered the refining of naphtha.  Some poor sods get to be the delivery mechanism for that volatile oil to the enemy, and goblins, being the lowest of the low, are often stuck with this duty.  A unit struck with a thrown oil attack must immediately check shock, as fire bears a visceral terror.  On a roll of a natural 1 with a thrown oil attack, the goblin grenadiers take 1UHP of damage and must check shock, in addition to gaining a depletion marker.  Goblin grenadiers take double damage from fireball, fire breath weapons, and similar effects, as the oil in their packs ignites.

Goblin grenadiers can also be employed against terrain.  If there are no units within their range (2 hexes) and forward firing arc, they can throw fire on the ground instead.  It takes 3 successful military oil attacks against AC0 to ignite a hex properly.  Most terrain becomes rough and obscuring when so ignited - units must move carefully around the fires, and the smoke blocks line of sight.  As the oil floats on top of water, even mud and lake hexes can be affected.  Forest and swamp hexes lit afire become impassable, as burning underbrush and falling limbs become serious hazards.  Ignited hexes burn for a least 10 minutes, which is longer than most battles will last.

Goblin grenadiers' thrown oil attacks also deal 5 SHP of damage per hit to siege towers and wooden structures.  As a result of these abilities, goblin grenadiers are useful in sieges, both defensively (igniting siege towers) and offensively (igniting hexes to block lines of sight and allow other units to advance to the walls).

Goblin grenadier wages are 3gp/mo, and their company TCO is about 1kgp/mo (accounting for the expensive oil that they use).  They require little training, and are available as goblin light infantry.  Their nominal BR is 0.75, but much of their utility is not captured by the BR calculation.

Goblin Spider-Knights: 2/4/6 Irregular Mounted, AC 7, HD 1-1, UHP 6, 2 lance and shield 10+, charge 2 bite 9+ and delayed poison (save at +2) (and bonus lance damage), ML +1

Goblins don't benefit much from the availability of advanced armors, because of their low carrying capacity.  This is less of an issue for cavalry, however, and giant spiders have tremendous carrying capacity, allowing them to carry an armored rider while heavily barded themselves.  This is a unit of goblins in plate with shields and lances mounted on giant crab spiders barded in lamellar.  While not as fast as wolves, they're much better armored, and their poison charge can really hurt high-HD units, and also inflicts shock.  They can climb sheer surfaces like cliff faces and castle walls.

They are, however, hideously expensive, with wages of around 71gp/mo per spider+goblin pair, and a company TCO of 8.25kgp/mo, for a battle rating of only 2.75.  Still, they're a fun idea.  Maybe spider-chariots make more sense - a pair of giant crab spiders (or a single giant black widow) can pull a heavy chariot, which can carry four goblin archers in heavy armor.

Of course, while we're on the subject of spiders as warbeasts, we may as well go all-out...

Elephant Spider

This was my first time using the Lairs and Encounters monster design rules; mostly I wanted to see just how much an elephant-sized spider could carry.

Concept: enormous spider
Type: Vermin
HD: 22
Saves: F11

Hmm for a gigantic (elephant-sized) spider, I need it to weigh at least 8000 lb, so I'm retroactively going to maximize BME to 1.68.  That gives me a mass of 4500lb, still insufficient.  To hit 4 tons, I need 22HD.  So that's what we're doing - 18HD, BME 1.68.  We're also going to maximize CCF, at 0.426 - these spiders are bred primarily to be enormous and to carry heavy things.  Using the cube-square rule, we get a carrying capacity of 1512 stone (by comparison, an elephant's carrying capacity of 180 stone).

AC 4
1 bite, 44 average damage -> 8d10, plus save-or-die poison (save at -2)
XP 5500 (HD 22*)
Treasure P,K
Spiders are pretty smart for vermin, with training mod +2 (but training period 1 year).  Given that this thing is enormous and selectively bred, I think Animal intelligence makes sense.
Natural lifespan of around 45 years.
You know, I don't see anywhere to calculate morale for monsters in this build system.
Trained value per L&E is something on the order of 121kgp, wages on the order of 3680 gp/mo.
BR per DaW is...  really annoying to calculate for individual monsters, actually.  So let's do a behemoth cavalry unit and derive it from there.

Given how much these things cost, it would be dumb to not armor them in plate (7200gp, 60 stone, +5 AC).  A gigantic war howdah costs 240gp and only weighs 18 stone - there's no way we're going to use up 1500st of carrying capacity on this thing.  We can put 12 orc lancers in plate in that howdah if we pack them in; if each orc weighs 20 stone and has 10 stone of equipment, we've used up a total of around 400 stone, well below even half carrying capacity.

So a unit of 5 of these has 60 orcs in plate packed into howdahs (AC 8, THAC0 14+) and five enormous spiders.  Speed is 120', translates to IM 2/4/6 (...  not actually faster than orcs on foot).  AC 8.66 -> 9, UHD 34, UHP 11.  The spiders generate 12.6 attacks, the lancers generate 4.95 attacks, for a total of 17.55 attacks, rounded to 18.  The spiders have THAC0 -4+, while the riders have THAC0 14+; the weighted average by number of attacks is 1+.

Morale is tricky.  Base morale of 0 for the spiders is not unreasonable, but then they're war-trained for +2.  The orcs are beast-riders and have ML +2, so the average ML is +2 regardless of weighting.  They are, however, unpredictable.

So here's how it all rolls out:

War Elephant Spiders: 2/4/6 Irregular Mounted, AC 9, HD 34, UHP 11, 18 lance and poison bite 1+, ML +2 unpredictable

So that's a hell of a unit.  BR is 18.25 before poison, which contributes about 3.5 points of BR, bringing it up to 21.75.  A single enormous spider with 12 orcs has a BR of around 4.25, and should demand a balanced monthly wage of around 3.1kgp, which is a bit under the wage L&E gave us of around 3.7kgp.  Anyway, 4kgp/mo is probably adequate to account for rarity, equipment, and riders.  Add in some specialists, supplies, and slop factor and you're probably looking at around 22kgp/mo TCO for a company of five of these things.  22kgp/mo is about four and a half companies of wolf riders at BR 6.5 each, or three and a half of boar riders at BR 8 each.  So in terms of BR/gp, superspiders aren't great compared to existing beastman cavalry.  They are, however, much more consistent on offense - four and a half companies of wolf riders can generate 29 attacks if they all charge, but on a non-charge turn only generate 9.  Given that they're irregular and can't disengage, charging multiple times is pretty rare.
The spiders get 18 attacks (at better THAC0) every round, forever, and can be expected to consistently kill one human unit per turn, and to shock even heavy infantry phalanxes, beastman heavy infantry, and giants (who are also very vulnerable to their poisonous bite).  On the other hand, four and a half companies of wolf-riders are honestly a lot harder to kill, with a total of 90 HP to the superspiders' 11.  High AC is nice, but if they're plowing through the center of a melee line they're going to start taking attacks from the side and rear, and some of those will hit eventually.  The spiders will also have trouble with cavalry (especially light), and have no answer at all to flying units.  I suppose there's really no reason to not give the orcs bows, besides not wanting to redo the BR math.
Probably plays a lot like an OGRE; you can clean up mainline units or make a run for the commanders, but eventually the enemy's light units will wear you down, so you must hurry.

Since they can climb walls, they're pretty useful offensively during sieges.  You could put catapults on their backs instead of orc lancers, but...  really you want these guys to be up in melee, clearing the tops of the parapets in advance of your ladders.

I guess at this point we've already really moved on to orcs from goblins, though.

Orcs

Orcs benefit substantially from the availability of heavy armor because their speed doesn't degrade until they're carrying 7 stone of gear, per Domains at War Campaigns page 35 (humans start to slow down at 5 stone).  The only reason not to upgrade the stock orc units is cost.  As a forward-thinking Evil Overlord focused on military modernization, up-armoring my orcish legions is a top priority.

Orc Armored Light Infantry: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 10+ or 2 sword and shield 10+, 2 spear 10+ ranged.  Equipped with chainmail, shield, spear, and scimitar.  Wages 8gp/mo, TCO 1.25kgp/mo, BR 1.75.

Orc Armored Heavy Infantry: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 3 polearm 10+.  Equipped with banded mail and a polearm.  Wages 11gp/mo, TCO 1.75 kgp/mo, BR 2.

You call that heavy infantry?  I'll show you heavy infantry.  Honestly the light/heavy distinction for beastman infantry is sort of artificial, since it's all Irregular Foot.

Orc Seriously Heavy Infantry: 2/3/4 Irregular Foot, AC 7, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 10+ or 2 axe and shield 10+, 2 spear 10+ ranged.  Equipped with plate, shield, spear, and battle-axe.  Wages 13gp/mo, TCO 2kgp/mo, BR 2.25.

May as well upgrade the archers and crossbowmen too, even.

Orc Armored Bowmen: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 battle-axe melee 10+, 2 shortbow ranged 10+.  Equipment: banded mail, shortbow, battle-axe.  Wages 9gp/mo, TCO 1.5kgp/mo, BR 2.5.

Orc Armored Crossbowmen: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 battle-axe melee 10+, 3 arbalest ranged 10+.  Equipment: banded mail, arbalest, battle-axe.  Wages 16gp/mo, TCO 2.25 kgp/mo, BR...  5.5?  Jesus.

Orcish Armored Boar Riders: 2/4/6 Irregular Mounted, AC 7, HD 6, UHP 24, ML +2, 2 spear and shield 10+, 5 bite 6+ on charge.  Equipment: giant boar (30st carrying capacity), orc (15st), spear (1st), shield (1st), plate armor (6st), chain barding (3st).  Wages 51gp/mo, TCO 7kgp/mo, BR 13.

Orcish Incinerators: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 torch 10+ melee, 5 thrown military oil 10+ ranged.  Equipment: Banded mail, 3 torches, 8 flasks of military oil.  Wages 8gp/mo, TCO 1.5kgp/mo, BR 3.5.  All the special rules that apply to Goblin Grenadiers also apply to Orcish Incinerators.

Once that reform is in plate (so to speak) and my iron-clad grip on the realm has stabilized, I'm going to want to start selectively breeding orcs for martial virtues like discipline (as well as desirable physical characteristics like increased toughness).  The end result of this orcgenics program is basically hobgoblins, but with 120' speed.  They are in no respect inferior to man, and they shall inherit the earth.  Saruman's uruks and Warhammer's black orcs are both in this mold.

Elite Orc Skirmishers: 2/4/6 Loose Foot, AC 5, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 9+ or 2 swordsword and shield 9+ melee, 2 spear or 2 javelin 9+ ranged.  Equipment: Chainmail, shield, sword, spear, 3 javelins.  Wages 15gp/mo, TCO 2kgp/mo, BR 4.

Elite Orc Pikes: 2/4/6 Formed Foot, AC 5, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 3 polearm 9+ melee, 2 javelin 9+ ranged.  Equipment: Banded mail, polearm, 3 javelins.  Wages 18gp/mo, TCO 2.5kgp/mo, BR 5.

Elite Orc Heavy Infantry: 2/3/4 Formed Foot, AC 7, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 9+ melee or 2 sword and shield 9+ melee, 2 javelin 9+ ranged.  Equipment: Plate, shield, spear, sword, 3 javelins.  Wages 20gp/mo, TCO 2.75 kgp/mo, BR 5.5.

Elite Orc Bows: 2/4/6 Loose Foot, AC 5, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 2 sword 9+ melee, 2 composite bow 9+ ranged.  Equipment: banded mail, sword, composite bow.  Wages 27gp/mo, TCO 3.5kgp/mo, BR 6.75.

Cavalry...  hm.  On the one hand, horses do not fit the orc / realm of darkness aesthetic at all.  On the other, they're so much faster than beastman mounts, and that really starts to matter with Loose Cavalry units.  There really aren't that many options for mounts that won't make you Irregular (by dint of being carnivorous).  Giant boars are actually viable for Formed Mounted, but they're so slow.  I dunno, I'll worry about this later.

Ogres are another unit worth up-armoring.  They're slow, but not getting any slower.  I'm not really clear on how to price armor for large humanoids, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

Ogre Armored Infantry: 2/3/4 Irregular Foot, AC 9, HD 4+1, UHP 21, ML +2, 5 polearm 6+.  Equipment: large plate armor, big polearm.  Wages 100gp/mo, TCO 7kgp/mo, BR 14.75.

Ogres also have the carrying capacity to personally carry and use light ballistae (a human has a base carrying capacity of 5st and can wield a 1st arbalest - an ogre has a carrying capacity of 40st, and should be able to wield a 5-7 stone light ballista).  Since ogres count as two men for unit composition purposes and are much stronger, I have little doubt that they can effectively crew such weapons personally.  At 60 ogres per unit, and 10 light ballistae per human ballista battery, a company of ogres each armed with a ballista would have firepower comparable to 6 human ballista units.  One might reasonably argue that they're not trainable as Artillerists and should take a -4 to-hit penalty, which might be fair.

Ogre Ballistiers: 2/3/4 Irregular Foot, AC 9, HD 4+1, UHP 21, ML +2, 4 sword 6+ melee, 12 light repeating ballista 6+ ranged (range 8 hexes, no volley overhead penalty, no move before fire, see DaW:B page 61-2 for more details) and 1 reload token.  Equipment: large plate armor, light repeating ballista, sword.  Wages 130gp/mo, TCO 8.75kgp/mo, BR...  well my spreadsheet is telling me their BR is 59.25.  Use at your own risk, I suppose.  Honestly they might be more useful in smaller units - 12 attacks all on one target is going to be overkill a lot of the time.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the next ballista up the chain is 80 stone, and not even giants have the carrying capacity to use one as a hand-weapon.

I suppose this would've been a fine place to apply Orc Chieftain Abilities for some chieftains and lieutenants.  Maybe next post.

Simple Domains: XP Up Front

For most of 2019, I was wrestling with squaring the circle of open table vs campaign play.  One of the central issues is "stuff over time" - expenses over time, income over time, etc.  When you don't keep very strong, consistent track of time between adventures, this stuff gets annoying.  I had a partial solution to problems of this form using ACKS' magic time-discounting ratio for mercenaries, turning them from an expense-over-time into a one-time cost.

It hit me a while back that the same could be done for domain income and, perhaps more importantly, domain XP.  Take the monthly net income, multiply it by the time constant of 30, and there's your XP value for conquering this domain, just like a monster entry.  No domain XP threshold, but the exponential XP curve sort of makes it work out - taking a (civilized) barony might give you 60k XP, but if you're high level that's not going to do much for you (might be worth extending the exponential progression up over 8th, instead of switching to linear progression - big domains yield a lot of XP).  And if you lose it, you lose the XP.  Sometimes this big lump of XP will be enough for you to level multiple times.  We already have a mechanism for dealing with big lump sums though - "you can only level once per adventure".  The same would work fine here - you can get better training by ruling a domain, but you need to go out and apply it in order to turn it into levels.  Maybe allow mass combats to also count as adventures.  This makes inheritance by a low-level character work out pretty cleanly; it doesn't take them from 1st to 8th overnight, it's still a gradual process, but a much-accelerated one that should bring them back to parity with the party relatively quickly.  Inherited domains could almost serve as a replacement for reserve XP as a power-floor for replacement characters.

If the party as a whole takes a domain, I see two ways to handle it.  One is to split the rulership XP among them equally, and then as they get more domains and start assigning them to individual characters you stop dividing it.  Another is to make class-specific stores of domain XP.  So maybe your civilized barony has 60k general rulership XP, 15k cleric tithes XP for whoever the spiritual leader is (works out about right, 500 families * 1gp/mo * 30 months), some amount of thief XP based on market class...  and then wizards are hard.  The thing I like about this is that when you move to personal domains, you can fill those slots with henchmen (if your hench repertoire is diverse), and level them up for rulership when you need vassals.  I'm not sure it's worth the complexity.

So then the primary benefits of domain rulership are XP and a captive market, and the focus in the domain game is on taking them from other people.  If you need cash from your domain, you can exploit it, which is sort of like self-pillaging and permanently reduces the XP value of the domain by an amount equal to the gold pieces extracted (and 1 peasant family per 120gp, not that we're modeling that here).  This seems like the right place to plug in a domain morale system that matches my assumptions, that for the most part your average peasant is never going to be terribly fond of his adventurer overlords and is mostly ambivalent until you start squeezing him.  So exploiting your domain (and other catastrophes and exceptional circumstances, like failure to address an invasion or donning a helm of alignment change) triggers a morale roll with immediate consequences like bandits or revolt, and otherwise domain morale is assumed to be apathetic.

I haven't looked at syndicates yet, but I think they'd be amenable to the same treatment, and if I abstract syndicates, then I can enforce the assumption that they're not made up exclusively of 4th-level spies, and then the math will be much saner (and if you use a syndicate to push beyond its normal limits, then you get into exploitation and popular morale).  Cleric domains should be fine.  I suppose I should turn my attention to magic research next, and figuring out how that would work in a system with loose timekeeping.  The other next thing to do would be to redo the Simple Domains entries with lump sums of XP.

Greek Elves

In the same vein as The Elves of Hazzard.

Historical Rome drew a lot of philosophy and culture from Greece.  If you have a human Rome-alike empire in a fantasy setting based on classical antiquity, it makes a lot of sense for there to have also been a Greece-alike that they drew a lot of their philosophy and culture from.  And if you're going to have that, then it makes a lot of sense for that Greece-alike to be elves.

Elves always have that precursor thing going on, and are a natural fit in that regard.  If you look at Greek tragedy, it's often about hubris and unavoidable doom, which are both appropriate for elves - hubris is a natural sin when you're the firstborn, and unavoidable doom links nicely to the fall of the Eldar and (in some systems) their inability to be resurrected.  Nietzsche's argument that Greek civilization was an odd synthesis of Apollonian law and Dionysian chaos also makes sense with the awkward balance elves strike, between golden firstborn and natural sorcerers.  The fractious nature of the Greek city states plays nicely with the chaotic and neutral tendencies of the elves, and helps explain how they were conquered by not-Rome.  Alexander's empire could also be mirrored, and then its disintegration into the warring diadochi on his death also makes sense with that fractious nature and explains how an elven empire could fall apart despite their individual long lifespans.  In an early/republican Rome setup, some of those successor states might remain viable rivals - it would not be hard to imagine Carthage, with its child sacrifice and its Moloch, as a dark elven state rather than Phoenecian in origin, especially if Greek elves picked up Athenian seafaring tendencies.

This setup also has the nice property that the elven homeland is long part of the human empire and relatively integrated, so elven PCs and human PCs probably get along OK.  Where you put dwarves, though, I'm not sure.  I sort of like the idea of Hittite dwarves with the tall hats.

Bonus: no need to construct an elven script, just use greek letters.

Things that don't fit so well: the Greeks were not big on archery, and Keegan argues that they more or less invented heavy infantry.  But this is no problem for the B/X elf or ACKS' spellsword, who both do just fine in heavy armor and don't get any particular bonuses to archery.  The Greeks had big manly beards and elves don't.  The mental image I have of Greece is more dry and rocky than forested, but looking at satellite imagery it seems that there's still quite a bit of forest, and there was probably more where there are now farm fields.  Still, more mountainous than one usually thinks of an elven homeland as.  Who are the Persia-equivalent that the elves held back?

MS Estonia and Rotated Dungeons

MS Estonia was a passenger ferry that sank in the Baltic in 1994, with 852 of 989 persons aboard perishing.  I stumbled upon a rather horrifying account of the sinking and there were some bits that stuck out to me as dungeoneering-relevant.

The interior hallways of the accommodation sections were windowless, fluorescent-lit passageways, smelling of aluminum and plastic, and barely wide enough for two people to pass. They ran fore and aft, and had branches from side to side. With their twenty-four-hour lighting and long rows of anonymous, closely spaced cabin doors, they gave those parts of the ship an institutional allure not much different from that of modern prison galleries. Moreover, the cabins themselves were smaller than cells, and though this must have been unimaginable to even the most miserable of their occupants that night, many soon turned into traps and then coffins...

She left the pub, walked forward past the information desk and up the main staircase, and went directly to her cabin, on Deck 6. When, shortly thereafter, the ship heeled over, her door popped open and she fell backward in her cabin and was pinned by gravity against the far wall. Because she was determined and nimble, however, she managed to emerge from the trap, to negotiate the tilting hallway, to climb to Deck 7 and the outside promenade, and ultimately to survive... 

[As the heel approached 90 degrees] The starboard cabin doorways now became chasms that had to be jumped across. Passengers who failed fell into the cabins, and some did not emerge. The transverse corridors became dangerous shafts, dropping away to the starboard side. Though no witnesses of this survived, after seawater began to enter through breaking windows, those shafts became deadly wells.

Takeaway 1: I am now looking at every room I enter and going "If this room were tilted 90 degrees in each direction, how screwed would its occupants be, assuming it held together?"

Takeaway 2: I've always had trouble justifying the use of pit traps.  But taking a sensible environment and then rotating it 90 degrees around the X or Y produces a totally reasonable justification for deep, deep pits and floors full of "trap" doors.  I think 90 degree rotation would probably be the easiest to work with, on graph paper or isometric mapping, and in play.

A highly-vertical environment without stairs seems ripe for OSRy play with emphasis on mundane gear.  Bring lots of spikes, lots of rope, maybe some planks to put along the edge of pits.  And it would give thieves lots of opportunities to scale sheer surfaces, as well as giving some play to abilities like Feather Fall, Levitate, and monk slow-fall that don't see much use.  It would also be a good excuse to play with altering hallway width and height.

What does the ecology of a highly-vertical dungeon look like?  Down in the pits, you probably have a lot of undead and dumb scavengers like mold and oozes.  Along the main hallway levels and in rooms that used to be tall but now are wide are your demihuman lairs.  Up in the top levels that can only be reached by sheer climbing, you get flyers and things that climb like spiders.

One sort of puzzle in stocking would be dungeon level.  Do you take the floors of the original environment and have that determine dungeon level, so your difficulty gradient is across horizontal movement in the rotated environment?  This seems like it would make it easier to keep organized (if your map is of the original environment and split by level there), but might also make it easy to stumble into difficult areas early.  But if you have deeper equal more dangerous in Z-space, then it's easy to fall into more difficult areas and not be able to return, in addition to being harder to keep organized.  Maybe you just make the whole space roughly the same difficulty...