Concerning Dungeons, Part I

"Dad, I want to tell you some of the stuff my guy has in the dungeon he's building. He has a Wall of Bone, three Walls of Fire, a Wall of Plants. He also has Floors of Bone and Walls of Insects, and Floors of Fire and Floors of Ice, Floors of Souls, Floors of Water, Floors of Webs, Bone Doors, Ice Doors, Plant Doors, Void Doors ... wait, I take that back, no Void Doors. And Bridges! Ice bridges and web bridges."


"Wouldn't the Floor of Fire melt the Wall of Ice?"

"What do you mean? Not if they were far away enough!"

Some silence.

"He also set a lava trap, so that if you're walking across the lava, if you step on the first stone -- on the second -- on a small stone next to right in the middle of the lava, if you step on the extra stone, all the stones suddenly pop into the lava -- they disappear, pop pop pop into the lava."

"So is the dungeon underground?"

"Yes, most of it."

"Why did he build it?"

"Becuase he thought it would be enjoyable to have a dungeon of his own. And his old house was a wreck (as I've told you many times). Now he constructed it so that many people will get out the front door if they come in, but only person will get out the back door and make it through the dungeon."

"Only one person EVER?"

"Out of a party. Only one person out of a party would make it through. BUT, the most dangerous entrance is the cave entrance. My guy put in four beholders in the front cave entrance."

"Do they fight?"

"The beholders? Do they fight with each other? No, they're LAWFUL EVIL! They work together."

Ah, right.

"The first entrance to the dungeon has another beholder, but it's not as powerful as the one in the cave. The third entrance, that one's only defense is that it's very difficult to find. It's camouflaged, and covered in rocks, because I didn't have anything else to put in."

"I take that back. He has four entrances. One of them, as I said, is a large dome. It's very large, and rocky and round, and it has a beholder in it. The second entrance are the caves, and in one part of the caves is a hole that enters the dungeon but it's guarded by four beholders. The fourth one is very very difficult to find, and it just leads straight into the dungeon. And the fourth one, there's this very very large mound of rock, a dome of rock, and stair built into it, and there's a cave, and that place is guarded by ... well, that place is actually a decoy. He just put that place for a decoy. It just turns out to be a dead end. He also put a monster in there, within the rubble, within a cliff face. On the side of one tunnel, if somebody comes in, the rocks start to fall away because the creature inside detected them, and as the rocks fall away, the creature begins to come out. It has human hands and as the hands come out, it bends the fingers, and this crust comes off. It's basically a big blob and it can make anything from the blob. When it first emerges, when every single bit of it emerges, it's covered in this crust and when the crust falls off it turns into this bluish liquid. It's the color of a gelatinous cube. It's basically a huge blob. It can turn into a whole river, it can disguise itself as a river.

"He also set a trap with a purple worm, that if you step into a chamber, the purple worm wakes up, and it waits till you're in the center of the cave, then it burst up through the floor. And it eats the people, if they weren't killed by flying rocks. Well, it eats those too."

"Does he live in the dungeon?"

"Who, the purple worm or my guy?"

"Your guy."

"Yes, he does live in the dungeon. He has this area. There's this area in the dungeon that's like a house. It's like this house except it doesn't have a room like this, it just has a single room, 'cause it has a library. It just has a living room, a bedroom and a library. And it has a magic room."

"How about windows?"

"Um ... no, it doesn't have windows because he doesn't like light. He despises the light.

"He also has a very beautifully designed throne."

***

It's E's birthday, or it was yesterday. Nine years on Earth. Usually we don't celebrate his birthday on The Day -- more often it gets deferred or moved up to the nearest weekend, so the actual day has become blurry. This week we're at the in-laws for Thanksgiving break. The kids are off school (though there was a half-day Monday and young R was very concerned that she was missing it). And I, as usual, am on some bastardized semi-vacation in which I am neither Here nor There, but half-working, half-not. Don't try this at home OR at work.

Anyway, we had his birthday yesterday, on the Day itself, which felt like rediscovering and reburnishing something very old, which had fallen unaccountably into disuse and been resurrected only with pains and serendipity: like an heirloom parsnip (comically squat, incomparably tasty, baked in earthen ovens by the Wichita) or a period instrument (we rediscovered the varnish recipe, which has to be leavened with the ash of Hamburg oak, and tuned it in the Old Way so that a C sharp is really sharp, as Bach and his friends would have heard it). And this rediscovery came with a further air of mystery, as the day itself is more than a day, since he was born after a 38-hour labor.

But none of that rambling mattered because it was his birthday, and after dinner, cake, and a playing of "Happy Birthday" on the penny-whistle by his eight-year old cousin Miss F, there were of course presents.

This was a smaller affair, which I like, because the home birthdays (and we'll have of those too, never fear) generally feature about 8-10 kids, and a good number of dutifully-purchased and not-inexpensive presents that still somehow don't all get used. In this respect Miss R's last birthday was more of a success than Mr E's last. E's 8th birthday, last year, resulted in a lot of games coming into the house. These were generally games of a pretty high quality, but we have been very slow to play them. Battleship Command: Pirates of the Caribbean Edition, for example, has been played about three times, but he doesn't find it too interesting, and hates losing, and I'm not convinced it's a very strong game. The Legend of Landlock is actually a nice little strategy game, and he publisher Gamewright looks like they, well, have some game, but this one was only cracked out recently, to be played by my mother and Miss R. (As it was my mother who got the game for E, she felt she had to make sure it got played). And he also got a copy of Mancala, which I've heard of all he time and never played, and which exists in so many versions I have no hope of linking to the one he actually got.

By contrast, Miss R's sixth birthday, this summer, featured a lot of fairly meaty craft-y things. There was a beading set with perhaps thousands of very small beads and fine thread and a really sharp needle, which I thought must be beyond her except it turns out it's not, at all; a "math Scrabble" game called Smath, which we played a bit recently, and successfully, though she could only do the adding problems; and a stained glass kit where you fill in quite complex shapes with thick go that hardens into translucency. This last one, despite being really porly executed in some ways (the patterns are made of soft, adhesive-backed rubber that you lay down on a plastic sheet before filling in, and the rubber is so flimsy and the molds so thin that it almost impossible to peel from the backing without ripping the molds) was by far the most popular, and only recently got exhausted (we still have goo, just nothing to pour it in).

So, there's a long digression on what sometimes doesn't work well in kid birthdays. But this was small, and all family members, and honestly, his family on my wife's side is exceptionally good with gifts and with celebrations of all kind. So the point is, I should tell you about the loot.

• a pendant of a faceted amethyst, very apropos after last week's lapidary exhibition
• A fat volume containing books 1-4 of Deltora Quest (these honestly are not very good, but a book's a book, even if I'd rather they were reading the Pippi Longstocking my sister-in-law brought: I was all about Pippi at that age ...)
  
• Two new Bionicle figures (respectively the Jaller and the Nuparu)
  
• Praying Mantis hand puppet, courtesy of Folkmanis
  
• And the item that occasioned the lead-in to this post: a new D&D volume, Dungeonscape

He's wanted Dungeonscape for a long time. He first saw it in the game store in South Carolina, back in April, when we visited there with Uncle K. Later, when I offered him a D&D book in ill-advised bribery for a swim lesson, he scrounged through the racks at the Strategist, trying fruitlessly to find Dungeonscape before setting for Stormwrack. (This was all recounted in an earlier post). So I had it in the back of my head as a birthday or Christmas present, and happily, was able to deliver. (In passing, after griping about the expense of these things, I can only recommend buying them at Amazon, where they seem to run about a one-third discount, possibly a bit more if you buy used).

E. was ecstatic. He held the book heavenward like grail, did a dance, hugged me. Later plunged into the book. All good. I had the reviews on the book, of which many, like this sample, were not good. It sounded like the gripers had some justification, but I also knew it wouldn't matter. I wasn't (yet) a snobby rules lawyer when I laid down my first dungeons at twelve and thirteen: no reason he should be at nine.

***

"Before it is possible to conduct a campaign of adventures in the mazey dungeons, it is necessary for the referee to sit down with pencil in hand and draw these labyrinths on graph paper. Unquestionably this will require a great deal of time and effort and imagination. The dungeons should look something like the example given below, with numerous levels that sprawl in all directions ..."

Ring any bells? The quote is from Gygax and Arneson, Dungeons and Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, vol 3. (The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures), (Tactical Studies Rules: Lake Geneva 1974), p. 3, if you want the scholarly citation. Or, to those of us who grew up with it, "book three of the boxed set". It was accompanied by diagrams like the following:



Or this:



(If you're wondering how many hoops I had to jump through to find and digitize my old copies of the Boxed Set, the answer is "none". Per a suggestion from Elliot on an older post, and things I'd found in my own wanderings, I simply zipped over to RPGNow, which sells PDFs of a huge variety of new and old gaming materials. PDFs of the Boxed Set became mine for a mere $5.99, which seems cheap till you try to navigate RPGNow's exquisitely horrible web interface. Despite being signed in, I had to sign in again to see the list of download links for what I'd bought. And it was not one link, but about seven, each one for a separate part of the product, one for the cover, one for each volume, one for the Ready Reference Sheets -- and each link had exactly the same title, AND the last two produced mysterious messages that said I wasn't allowed to download them! You can't beat the prices, but be prepared for a slog. Put that way, I guess some hoop-jumping was involved after all).

Well, that's how it was in my day. When E wandered by and I showed him the old boxed set pages on screen, he glanced at it only briefly, then wandered away. "Is that boring?" I called after him. "Yesssss" he groaned. Ah well.