Campaign Report - The Lost Temple of The Icosidyad
This week my first attempt at running a dungeon in something like an 'OSR' style came to an end. The campaign encompassed around 15-20 infrequent sessions over the course of a year. It began as I was starting to discover the 'OSR' culture of play after a hiatus from running ttrpgs.
I'm obviously a latecomer to the 'OSR' 'scene' (which is ambiguously 'dead' anyways) so this campaign was a messy exercise in catching up on years of game design & debate. I was drawn to the OSR in large part due to frustrations I experienced trying to GM in the 'neo-trad' style a few years ago -- I discuss some of my takeaways at the end of this post.
We used Worlds Without Number as it was the OSR-adjacent system I was most familiar with at the time & the implied setting aligned fairly well with my own.
The Party
A necromancer, an expert (stealth-focused), a warrior, and another expert (ranged-weapon focused). All played by friends I have been gaming with since high school.
I used milestone leveling, usually awarded upon the completion of a dungeon level. (At campaign start I was unfamiliar with the compelling case for gold-for-xp) Characters began at level 1 and finished the campaign at levels 5-6.
We ran the game remotely using Discord and Roll20 & played around once per month.
The Dungeon
The LToTI is a big-but-not-mega-dungeon with ~130 keyed rooms, not including two ancillary settlements. Within my larger worldbuilding project it's located on the warm central savannah portions of The Spine in Knorthwestern Antibor. (exact hex tbd)
The main gimmick was that parts of the dungeon were gated by shrines corresponding to tarot major arcana cards I-XI (each mapped to a god in the fictional religion). Each shrine statue had a puzzle with a cryptic (sometimes rhyming) clue & would open its hand to yield up a color-coded key when the right conditions were met.
The fictional context was that the dungeon was built by a heretical gnostic sect that took the 'if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him' idea literally. The deepest layer (Tarot XI: The World) was an ancient quantum computer that was designed to deduce the exact location of a demiurgic flute-player (Tarot 0: The Fool) that (allegedly) lulls the cosmos into an enchanted slumber. The rest of the complex was designed to pose a series of challenges that permitted only the most brave, cunning, and deadly to reach the end and learn the fool's location (in theory at least, the challenges as written fail if one thinks about it for more than 2 seconds). Of course, over millennia, it decayed, was broken into, etc. so the dungeon as-written was a vestige of that original project.
I'm a tarot afficionado but not an expert. I used learntarot.com as my main reference for card meanings and associations but took many liberties.
A pdf of my dungeon key can be viewed here. At the time of writing it's still missing the entirety of level 4 and much of levels 3 & 5. I'm sharing it not under the pretense that it's remotely good, but because it's sort of interesting to trace how it evolves as I learned & experimented.
The main beats of the dungeon are outlined below:
Level 1
I threw the level 1 and 2 maps together at the last minute with minimal plan for the overall layout. I had a perfunctory understanding of Jacquasying & wanted to make sure that players could access both levels from the start, but aside from that I just winged it.
The campaign began with the players as the sole survivors of a wrecked prisoner-transport airship, conveniently crashed outside the rear entrance to a thief's cavern dug out next to the complex, with tunnels leading to level 1 and 2.
Levels 1 and 2 once served a functioning temple where commoners would worship, ignorant of the enormous workings beneath their feet. The upper level had been desecrated by Golden Men who rejected the Icosidyad thousands of years ago in favor of Yog-Sothoth. The lower level had only been accessed recently by the excavation efforts of some thieves, and was not yet desecrated.
Level 1 contained shrines to St. Ilidia (II. High Priestess) and St. Weirlund (I. The Magician). To solve the former, a crescent-moon crown found in the thief's chest had to be restored to the statue. To solve the second, water from St. Ilidia's magic basin had to be poured into the chalice at St. Weirlund's feet, triggering a (kind of stupid, wish I had something better) battle with 1 HD elementals of each type.
The Town
I was a dummy and placed a town right outside the dungeon, leading to some weird contortions later. In an ideal world I would have introduced rival adventuring parties, factions, etc, but I didn't have the mental bandwidth for all that tracking and mostly dropped all involvement of the overworld once the players got to level 4. This is entirely a failing on my part, especially given that WWN provides a lot of support for faction tracking.
The river bifurcates the town: the 'Golden Men' live in Baquil, where they control the old temple building & ceremonially desecrate it in a perfunctory annual festival. The Stregovari are devout Icosidyadians and live in a newer settlement (Narrenburg) on the Psouthern side of the river.
I tried to introduce a dynamic where both sides were trying to get the players to sell loot or report on their discoveries but failed to connect the faction aims to anything specific inside of the dungeon. Really the only redeeming aspect here is that the town provided another angle on some of the relevant lore, even if it didn't 'hit home' the way I envisioned.
Level 2
The long, rubble-blocked corridor on the Psouthern part of the map had shrines to Sts. Agnos and Alanthe (IV. Emperor and III. Empress). The former required a drop of royal blood from the old suzerains of this region. Their descendants could be identified using the royal archives in room 10. (I wrote a little sidequest to rescue the last heir from a shady mining operation that was actually a front where unscrupulous slavers were supplying humans to a basilisk in exchange for magic nectar that it was guarding (the basilisk was insane and wanted to make a human skin suit)).
The Empress shrine had an uninspired randomized drinking game where players risked random effects with each sip but got a shot at earning the key.
Once the players had keys from the first four shrines, they could place them on St. Ogilev's (V. Hierophant) keyring and open stairs to level 3.
Level 3
For level 3 I tried to play with the idea of 'zones' and outside intrusions into the temple complex. Thus the outpost that also connects to an old atomic pile in 3b.
Level 3a
This level was meant to be a sanctum where initiates would live and train to brave the lower levels.
It had four shrines. The overarching puzzle was that each shrine exerted a magnetic pull on the rotating dial in the center (representing Idraluna, or X. The Wheel of Fortune). Only when all four were activated could the dial be manually rotated to face the city of Idraluna (the south pole) at which point it functioned as an elevator to level 4.
Other shrines:
- St. Clastrix (VII. The Chariot): the players had to demonstrate sufficient ambition to earn the respect of the shrine's talking sphinxes. Ironically a weak-ass unambitious entry, but they can't all be winners.
- Sts. Levis & Astris (VI. The Lovers): If I was bolder I'd have made the PCs fall in love or smooch each other or something, but they just had to join hands for the key and a freebie minor telepathy power.
- St. Zartha (IX. The Hermit): the hidden door to his sanctum could be illuminated by shining a light through the kaleidoscopic glass roof above room 8. The players were able to deduce that there had to be something in the Psouthwestren corner by the locations of the other three shrines.
- St. Veclund (VIII. Strength): When the players arrived, kobellins (my goblins are different) were holding an impromptu powerlifting meet with the icosidyad-themed kettlebells in this room (the shrine's golden key was the prize). Despite a good effort, the party's fighter rolled a lower Exert check than the kobellin leader & had to go on a sidequest to kill a rat king infesting the sewers of the nearby kobellin city.
- The branching passages here lead to 3b.
Level 3b
This one has a kobellin outpost where the players could either fight or befriend the kobellins (they befriended) & an ancient nuclear plant stocked with some nifty loot at the cost of mutagenic risk. (They didn't go in). Boats rowed into the 'Undersea' at the bottom could be used to reach the kobellin city of Bitter Lake Dome, which the players had to visit to retrieve St. Veclund's key.
In general, the kobellins of Bitter Lake Dome ended up being a better implementation of the 'haven' and 'faction play' idea than whatever I was trying to do with the town described above. The players completed a well-defined quest to earn their friendship, used the town as a base to retreat, resupply & heal, and tangibly benefitted from being able to traverse the kobellin-controlled stretches of the dungeon.
Level 4
I think I made this one after I started playing White Box & got psyched about the idea of sprawling, Jacquaysed gonzo dungeons. This is the first level where the complex shifts from a place of worship to a challenge arena for potential messiahs; I sprinkled dead acolytes around with their treasured possessions or death poems & also integrated more sci-fi elements to create the impression of some kind of technological infrastructure working behind the scenes.
The squiggly rooms in the Psoutheste lead offmap to the 'Fungal Fissure of Floxos', a Mycelian colony that I mercifully did not have to stock. (But I still had some fun with an infected kobellin NPC who tried to lead the players into a fungal trap).
I sprinkled a couple sci-fi power cells around along with opportunities to use them, e.g.:
- 10 shots with a mag-rifle
- A robotic construct that could offer advice & directions
- A spider-robot that could square off on even terms with the wailing loper (see below)
- The wall-magnet puzzle in room 33 (see below)
- Unlocking doors to room 6 (to bypass a trap in room 5)
Three shrines here:
- Vestia (XI. Justice) in room 17. Instead of a key, she was associated with a magic sword that (when the PCs arrived) was sticking out of the back of a slow, lumbering monster (the Wailing Loper). The PCs ended up killing it outright but I got some mileage out of scaring them for a while.
- Corian (XIII. Death) -- Just a good old-fashioned skeleton fight lmao.
- Elanzar (XII. The Hanged Man) was one of my best puzzles. The statue was suspended over an abyss by a silver thread that only Vestia's sword could cut. The walls of the circular chamber (room 33) were magnetic if activated by a power cell, so players had to doff metal arms and armor to maneuver. The magnet could pull the statue so it's not over the abyss, but they players had to figure out how to finagle things to cut the cord & have the statue land in the right place. (They ended up using the magnet to thread a rope through the statue's arms, then deactivating the magnet to use the sword).
Level 5 + The Tower
Each side had a means of cloning soldiers (identical monochromatic homunculi for Rilya and fucked-up chimera demons for I'anir) who did battle every eight hours in the big central arena. Little servitor robots would drag casualties down the chutes on the Psouth end of the battlefield. The blobby stuff on the Psouth side of the map was a massive biotech digester that processed the fighters back into a bioslurry, to be 3d printed into new soldiers ad infinitum.
To complete this level, the PCs had to cause one side to win, either by joining one side of the battle and leading troops to the opposing shrine, or by venturing into the digester and shutting off the recycling flow to one side. (They did the latter, cutting of the flow to I'anir).
I personally think this level is pretty cool, but I should have prepared better for mass-combat & stocked each base with more interactivity. Also, situating the battle in a maze or even a DOTA-style array of bottlenecks would have been more tactically interesting.
This level had the distinction of being the most times I have used the word 'orifice' in a D&D session.
Defeating I'anir caused a helical staircase to descend from the ceiling of the battlefield. The players ascended only to find that it went on, and on, and on, and on, interspersed with giant bat attacks and arcing lightning bolds dealing d12 damage on a failed save. They had ventured into the (shrine?) of Xel Aur (XVI. The Tower). After a bunch of experimentation, they deduced that they could only take a leap of faith off the stairs into the void, and landed safely at the entry point to level 6.
Level 6
The next three tarot cards were the Nissa, The Star, Lune, The Moon, and Sol, The Sun (XVII, XVIII, XIX respectively). Each was associated with one of the concentric rings of this level. One segment in each ring had an illusory version of the relevant celestial body hovering by the ceiling. All segments contained magic mini-orbs (though some were hidden or defended). When the PCs touched an orb in a segment neighboring the illusory celestial body, it would appear above the touched orb and disappear from the neighboring segment. When the three were brought into alignment mellifluous harmonies permeated the halls and an elevator descended to the final level.
The interior section had more weird shit & 'maintenance' rooms, mostly there for flavor.
I went full gonzo when I stocked each ring, free-associating monsters, puzzles, traps, etc. In one room, the torture-machine from Kafka's In the Penal Colony could write clues on the skin of any PC willing to risk a save. One room just had a big-ass frog demanding payment of 25,000 'celestrions' (lunar currency, extremely rare on Antibor) to regurgitate the orb for that segment.
One I'm kind of proud of is the 'veiled room' with a color-coded puzzle where gates had to be traversed in order to produce the orb. They corresponded to the eye colors of a blindfolded beholder ocularch that bounced around begging the PCs to release it from its impediment, obviously attacking them if they do so without some other way of restraining it.
The players seemed to have fun with this level; there was an initial phase of exploration as they deduced the layout and started to figure out which rooms are safe to traverse and how the mini-orbs functioned, then some intense strategizing as they tried to plan the optimal way to align all three orbs.
Final Level
This was just a boss battle arena: a platform suspended over an immense void. A massive computer could be seen at the far end, but the way was blocked by an Idol Feaster, a huge HD 20 mechanical construct acting as the 'shrine' to Tolem (The Last Judgement). I put on the Mechanicus OST and we all had a surprisingly satisfying boss battle -- near-run (mage & fighter both dropped to 0 hp) but with no permanent fatalities.
When the judge was felled, the logic engine (XI. The World) proved the most heinous adversary yet, delivering an overwrought lore monologue explicating the history and purpose of the temple that concluded with an exhortation to deactivate it and carry its precious-metals-based circuitry back to the surface. (so at least the PCs got to retire wealthy :/)
Lessons Learned
Beginning with a clear concept (tarot-themed puzzles) was good and bad. It gave the dungeon a tidy structure & provided many solid hooks for themed puzzles and monsters. However, it posed a barrier to using typical stocking procedures & gave the dungeon a non-sandboxy sense of directedness. Since joining a proper megadungeon campaign and reading Philotomy's Musings I've come to prefer dungeons where exploration isn't directed toward a final goal, but I arrived at that insight only after starting the campaign. In hindsight, the most fun levels were 3, 4, and 6, as they were relatively open-ended and loosely resembled sections of a 'classic' megadungeon.
I learned that you have to be explicit about OSR procedures if you want to use them. (Duh, lol). If you want to roll a random encounter every turn, tell your players that and enforce it. If you want players to end expeditions in a place of safety, say so. This is especially important on a VTT where players are more inclined to drag their tokens around willy-nilly and ignore procedures. It's also much easier to relax or drop a procedure than to introduce one mid-campaign.
With that said, I did a better job adhering to abstract OSR principles like neutral refereeing, scenario-based design, & non-linear problem solving. I wrote the dungeon as the dungeon, without fussing about balance or trying to anticipate how players would get past obstacles. In play, I worked off of my notes and stuck to whatever I read there. Die rolls were made in the open. Overall this was very satisfying for both players and GM.
I am grateful to have read the Goblin Punch list of OSR challenges early on; puzzle design benefitted greatly from those examples. In particular, the magnet puzzle on level 4 was a huge hit, as was the sun/moon/star puzzle on level 6.
I'm also proud how much purely story-based buy-in the dungeon evoked. The players are all old friends and I feel immense gratitude for their willingness to indulge my obtuse design choices, confusing lore, and poor skill at running NPCs. Having seen heated debate about the proper role of incentives and extrinsic rewards in OSR games, I'm delighted that (despite stocking the dungeon with very little treasure, few combat encounters, and eschewing gold-for-xp) I had no difficulty motivating my table to explore the whole dungeon just to see what's at the bottom.
On Worlds Without Number: It's a well-built system, but I went back-and-forth on it. It was easy enough for us all to learn, and the players seemed to enjoy it. Nobody went really hard on 5e-style 'builds' (which WWN does allow for), but they did create mechanically interesting, differentiated characters. It's high-powered for an OSR system and so despite having a small party there were no fatalities, albeit numerous occasions of being reduced to 0 HP. Sometimes it was a little clunky, and the dense rulebook can be tough to refer to on the fly. My take is that WWN almost perfectly fills a desirable 'grittier 5e + good GM tools + clearer procedures' niche, but as a GM I'm weird & fussy and probably would vibe more with minimalist rules like OD&D, Knave, ITO, etc.
Other lessons & takeaways:
- Don't shoehorn in 'faction play' if you're not prepared to properly track what each faction wants, possesses, and is doing.
- I like the idea of making the party share a single vtt token to enforce the idea that the dungeon is explored in 'turns' and that the party functions mostly as a unit.
- I've been hard on some of the uncreative tarot puzzles above (e.g. the Chariot, the Lovers, and the Empress), but I learned that they don't all have to be winners. It's tough to predict what will actually click with players, and having a few easy or freebie puzzles smooths out the pacing.
- Similarly, even a boring or grindy fight can be fun if not overused; there's inherent suspense whenever death is wagered. Lately I'd avoided thinking in terms of 'combat encounters' at all: make places that are interactive with or without combat, stock them with evocative foes, and let them interact organically. Avoid the 'Oblivion tutorial dungeon' thing where each set-piece encounter has hand-placed environmental interactions.
- Using LaTeX to write a key and then reading it off a pdf is 1000x better than working from a text editor or trying to decipher my own handwriting.
- I experimented with both d6 encounter rolls and Arnold K's underclock. Ended up slightly preferring the former.
- In a scenario-based adventure it helps to blatantly redirect player attention to their current options when they start dithering - "Ok, so there's a door to the Knorth and Este, you still haven't examined the lever by the fountain, and there's also that trap door you passed over in the previous room. What do you want to investigate next?"
And were I ever to re-run it:
- I'd draw new maps and add extra rooms to give each shrine more breathing room & allow more random encounters.
- I'd rework level 5 to replace the open battle arena with a maze.
- I'd place more treasures and monsters.
- I'd move the town farther from the dungeon entrance and either give each half of the town a specific desired artefact from the dungeon or simply make it an inert haven.
- I'd consider drafting one (1) rival adventuring party and have a table or procedure to determine if/when it completes different shrines.
- I'd seed the town & upper levels with more rumors and hints about the dungeon's original purpose.
All told, I'd chalk this campaign up as an interesting mix of success and failure. I came in with some really lofty ambitions & didn't realize them fully, but there are (imo) some gems within the resulting mess.