Mythic Underworld Dungeon Delving Motivations

Given a mythic underworld dungeon that is actually The Underworld, why the heck would PCs want to go there?

The Debtor - Rent, bar tab, wizard college student loans, and/or child support are almost due, and you're allergic to "real work".

The Mad Lad - You're a literal psychopath who knows no fear and thinks exploring the underworld sounds like fun

The Smuggler - You "lost" a shipment of top-quality pipeweed belonging to Don Jobbo the Halfling Godfather.  Surely even his well-dressed goons wouldn't be crazy enough to look for you here.  Roll again for your cover story.

The Merchant - You're looking for new markets to trade with and new goods to import from the overworld.  May or may not ultimately be in the employ of Don Jobbo.

The Gambler - You took a really bad bet and lost, and now there's something in the underworld you need to go find to make good on your end.  Roll again to find out who you lost the bet to.

The Pretender - Aspirant to the throne of the Old High King, you need the royal regalia lost in the underworld to assert your rightful claim.

The Rescuer - You seek to recover the soul of a deceased loved one from the underworld.  Harp optional.

The Lost Soul - Cursed by a wicked sorcerer, your body lives but your soul has been banished to the underworld!  Or so the sorcerer claimed.  You seek to recover your own soul.

The Cultist - You seek to free the Old Ones from their imprisonment in the underworld and bring an end to the rein of the gods of law.  You might want to roll again for a cover story.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice - You seek the lore and relics of the Usurper, an archmage who challenged the gods, met a bad end, and had his personal effects and/or body parts scattered through the underworld in retribution.

The Paladin in Hell - You're on a crusade to slay as many servants of chaos as possible, and where better to do it than in the underworld itself?  Smite and cleave, until it is done.

AD&D 1e PHB, page 23

The Inquisitor - You seek to prevent the release of the Old Ones by thwarting the schemes of their cultists, who surely have an interest in the Underworld where their masters are imprisoned.  You may not actually have any authority but you're not going to let that stop you from doing whatever you deem necessary.

The Dead Man - You have suffered a terrible shame, and are now compelled to go on a quest to die well in atonement, so as to erase the shame from your family name.  How better to die well than boldly facing the terrors of the underworld?

The Sworn Brother - You owe your life to another PC and fully intend to follow them into hell and back.

The Clerk - You have been tasked by the Celestial Bureaucracy with serving legal paperwork to an entity residing in the Underworld (possibly one of the deceased, possibly a demon lord).

The Stranger - You're from a distant time and place and heard there might be a way home through the underworld.  You're still just a 1st-level fighter though, be ye astronaut, caveman, cowboy, or samurai.

The Family Businessman - Your father made his fortune with one big score from the underworld, as did his father before him.  Plumbing the underworld is just the done thing.  You have lots of siblings and cousins, and you had lots of uncles before they all tried their hand at "the done thing"...

The Gentleman Adventurer - Her Majesty's archives regarding the underworld are woefully incomplete; perhaps bringing back extensive notes will finally earn you that knighthood.  Sadly it's been a very long trek full of misfortunes and you find yourself bereft of funds...

The Unforgiving - Someone pissed you off so bad that killing 'em once wasn't enough; you have resolved to scour the underworld to find them and inflict further suffering on them in the afterlife.

The Gourmand - Having grown bored of the delicacies of the overworld, you have come to the underworld to sample its exotic and forbidden foodstuffs, however ill-advised this might be.  I hear the pomegranates are great this time of year.

The Simp - You read too many salacious scrolls and now you got the thirst for that succubussy.  Surely the underworld is the right place to seek them?  Accept no substitutes.

The Supplicant - You've done some bad things and you're pretty sure you're not gonna have a good afterlife.  You have come to meet lower powers and see if you can do them some favors now in return for some favors later.

The Evangelist - Your mission is to bring posthumous salvation to the dead by converting them to the true faith.  Your sect is heterodox and there's much debate over which rites are required for posthumous salvation and whether it's possible at all, but you're not about to let some theorizing scholastics stop you.

The Would-Beast - You despise your human frailty and seek to drink deep of the Well of Chaos to "transcend" it through mutation.

Tables by alignment:

Law:

1. The Pretender
2. The Rescuer
   
3. The Paladin in Hell
4. The Inquisitor
   
5. The Evangelist
6. The Clerk
   
7. The Sworn Brother
8. The Dead Man
   

 Neutrality:

1. The Debtor
2. The Mad Lad
   
3. The Smuggler
4. The Merchant
   
5. The Gambler
6. The Lost Soul
7. The Stranger
8. The Family Businessman
9. The Gentleman Adventurer
10. The Gourmand
    

Chaos:

1. The Cultist
2. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
3. The Unforgiving
4. The Simp
5. The Supplicant
6. The Would-Beast
    

Quality Links

I've been pretty busy between crunch at work and prep for my Midnight ACKS game, but there have been a number of really good posts that came up on my radar this week.

First off, Koewn's analysis of ACKS' stealth mechanics is fantastic.  I was considering (am still considering, actually) an ACKS assassin that trades plate for something else, and this has reasonably convinced me that they don't need Naturally Stealthy (-1 to enemy surprise rolls) to be effective at sneaking at low levels.  Honestly, reading his analysis, I'm pretty convinced that ACKS' stealth system is fine and we've just been Doing It Wrong; I actually kind of like that a 1st level thief is ~18% more likely to surprise a target than a common man.  As Koewn points out, this is about on par with the incremental improvement in combat ability that fighters get, with a 1st-level fighter being better but not massively better than a common man. The question remains, though: what to give assassins?  I'm thinking Poison Use (some combination of bonus to saves against poison, bonus to proficiency throws to produce poisons, no chance to poison self when using poison), but I haven't set on anything yet.

Second, Trilemma has a pair of solid posts on knowlege and preparation and DM-player bandwidth.  The first is a good statement of the general philosophy behind his prior (excellent) posts on useful dungeon description and monstrous effects on terrain, as well as explaining the importance of intel in old-school gaming, the prevalence of monsters with crazy immunities, and (indirectly) why vancian casting was awesome.  In a way, it explains a lot of the mechanical oddities of the Old School that fell by the wayside as cultural, playstyle elements of the Old School (which made those mechanical elements sensible) faded due to dilution, and in identifying those cultural elements provides a path forwards/backwards, depending on how you look at it.

Trilemma's second post, on bandwidth, is particularly relevant to me at the moment, as I am engaged in world creation and trying to get data to my players.  It's also somewhat interesting because "the bandwidth problem" was something parts of my group have been talking about for years, but never thought to write down.  I have the good fortune of having a player this campaign who really likes lore (at one point he explicitly asked me for more lore, and I was taken aback; not a problem I've ever had before!), but my approach is still mostly a combination of a (written lore), c (no lore), and d (players propose reasonable lore).  Some but not many things are fixed (written lore), many things that aren't relevant to the game just don't exist (no lore), and if my players propose something that makes sense, it's on me to either find a good a reason it isn't true, or to adopt it.  I imagine this is probably true of most campaigns, that they follow hybrid approaches.  Still, interesting stuff to think about.

Finally, today from the Hill Cantons, two solid posts on building and running dynamic sandboxes [1, 2]!  Since I'm running a dynamic sandbox at the moment, these are extraordinarily relevant to my interests.  The first article discusses having a campaign news cycle and dynamic encounter tables, while the second focuses on his Chaos Index world engine and campaign-scale event charts.  The campaign news cycle is probably not reasonable for a setting like Midnight, where news is sparse and literacy is sparser, but dynamic encounter tables are something I've been playing with lately.  ckutalik proposes a "New Development" slot on one's random encounter tables, where something related to a world event or past PC actions shows up when rolled.  I've been thinking about having an encounter queue instead - when the PCs take an action which generates Consequences, those consequences go in a queue.  When you roll "queued encounter" on the table, you pick something sensible from the first couple of things in the queue and that's what they find.  This means that consequences can linger in the queue for quite a while, but will probably find the PCs eventually.  I've also considered having multiple queues on a per-area basis; failing to assassinate the duke might queue a squad of royal guards in his domains, and bounty hunters in each of several nearby domains.  Things like that.

From the second post, I could see setting up a Shadow Index, where certain actions increase the grip of the Shadow on the world and that alters things cosmologically (again, ideally I think I'd want per-area or -domain indices, so that some places can be deeply shrouded while others are 'points of light').  I've been running some loosely-defined world engines for various plots that are afoot; when the players decide to engage the ghouls hunting the farmers of Ostergot, the mushroommen of the Monastery Caverns grow and multiply, and when they fight the mushroommen, the ghouls spread.  Event charts are something I should consider; my plan currently is to use politics as the primary event-driving factor for the campaign, but the occasional natural disaster or similar would not be amiss.  My thought is to set up a network of high-power NPCs who have various relations with each other, and in any given unit of time some may undertake actions (declaration of war, assassination, charm / domination, slander, ...) against others, the consequences  of which trickle down to the PCs.  Event tables would be a simpler way to handle this, though, with "assassination attempt on X by Y", "raiding of X's domains by Y", and "warfare of X against Y" as table items with fillable variables as sensible.  Maybe I'll do that instead.

Anyway, good posts, well worth reading.

Traveller - Random Bounty Target Table

This came up on the radio recently.  Don't ask what manner of radio station.  In any case, it got me thinking about bounty hunting in Traveller.  It's a wonderful, hazardous, morally grey activity, which means it's eminently suited to PC operation in Old School Traveller.  The trouble I typically had was with coming up with open bounties when my players hit the TAS station; the idea's well and good, but implementing it is somewhat trickier.  And so, in preparation for future need, a set of tables is born.

Bounty source:
1-3: Government
4-5: Corporate
6: Private citizens

Crime of bounty:
1-2: Piracy
3: Murder
4: Smuggling
5: Terrorism
6: Other (espionage, desertion, insider trading, insulting a nobleman, ...)

Bounty assets (roll as many as you feel necessary):
2: Psionics
3: Military-grade armament (possibly experimental)
4: Exceptionally good hiding place
5: Great wealth
6: Loyal crew
7: Fearsome reputation
8: Well-constructed alter ego
9: Provided refuge by a foreign government / extradition law
10: Fanatical followers
11: Leet hacker skills ;)
12: AI, shapeshifter, or otherwise hard-to-apprehend nonhuman

Bounty liabilities (reroll as necessary for consistency with assets):
1: Substance addiction
2: Utter belief in rightness of cause and impossibility of defeat ("Your lack of faith disturbs me")
3: Sense of honor
4: Spouse or other close associates deemed non-disposable
5: Superstitious or strong religious convictions
6: Wanton cruelty ("You have failed me for the last time")

Bounty hunting complications:
1: Interference from other bounty hunters
2: Bounty is actually innocent (or other moral quandary)
3: Got the wrong guy (33% chance planted by target or enemies of players, 66% chance poor luck)
4: Paying authority fails to pay up (small text in contract, hides behind bureaucracy, pays in monetary vehicles that don't vest for 20 years, turns out to have been a front for organized crime and vanishes into thin air, &c)
5: Promised pay amount far too low for actual hazard level (not clear until engaged)
6: Treachery by PCs' hirelings, if any.  If none, come up with something interesting.

With a little further effort, I expect this setup might work alright for ACKS too.