Heilung is whispering weird stuff about Roman legions and the Carpatian forest through my headphones and I’m restocking Stonehell dungeon.
So… how does it work? I’m using the official Stonehell restocking table even though I had a lot of other ideas. The problem with the other ideas was that the dungeon was super alive and overflowing with cool stuff happening in the first ten or twenty rooms. The players practically never left the starting area. I had to switch to something simpler. I still believe that the mega dungeon should be impossible to clear, but at the same time I want to enable players to actually move through it.
My take is that you need to adjust the time between restockings based on how many hours you play and on how disorganised your players are. I’ve trained myself to be pushy ever since we started to play for just 1h 45min per session. That’s not a lot of time!
Stonehell recommends the following table:
1d6Result1Monster2Monster & Treasure3–6Empty with a 1-in-6 chance of unguarded treasure
I mean it’s cool if new monsters come up, new sublevels are discovered, bomb factories open and need to be dismantled... but at the same time you’ll never leave the first quadrant of the first level if that’s how you do it. – 2022-03-29 Restocking, Comments
+-----+--------------------------------+ | 1d6 | Result | +-----+--------------------------------+ | 1 | Monster | | 2 | Monster & Treasure | | 3–6 | Empty with a 1-in-6 chance of | | | unguarded treasure | +-----+--------------------------------+
2022-03-29 Restocking, Comments
The result of this is that my printed copy of Stonehell kept accumulating notes. Monsters killed. Monsters returned. Treasures removed. Treasures restocked.
As time passed, it started to get unwieldy because I kept overwriting my notes. Marginalia are cool, but how long can you keep adding them? Not for long!
So now I’m taking @phf’s hint: I’m transferring the notes to a text file and editing that instead.
A markdown file on the right, a HTML rendering on the right, and a shell prompt
Perhaps I’m going to print out these notes and use them while I’m running the dungeon levels in question? The idea being that I will most likely only need to update and print one or two pages between sessions as everything else remains untouched.
A PDF rendering of the changed notes
How do you do it?
I’m starting to wonder whether selling a megadungeon in print isn’t bad usability in the first place. You practically need the ability to rewrite sections of it as players come and go. Or you’re playing it not as a megadungeon but as a regular linear dungeon, a continuous adventure with the players never turning back and thus not caring about restocking.
#RPG #Megadungeon
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How did you export the text to a note file? I like small file sizes but seems like s lot of manual effort to type it all again
– Oliver 2022-09-01 18:41 UTC
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Copy and paste (with a bit of manual editing), or the `pdftotext` command line utility (and a bit of manual editing). It’s not quick, that’s for sure.
– Alex 2022-09-01 21:05 UTC
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I ended up just using post-its in the book and numbering them based on the rooms affected. I can cross out things on the notes themselves or just rewrite the entry on a new post-it note. Another option is to use pencil and just erase. I’m also discovering some great erasable pens being made these days.
In terms of how much to restock - I think it’s a good idea to create a mostly unhindered path through the dungeon that the party likes to take and maybe only roll once for encounters per quadrant (if we’re talking Stonehell), so long as the players remain on that path. The monsters have learned not to mess around too much with the folks taking that path.
– Jason A. 2022-09-07 03:11 UTC
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Yeah, good point. Two sessions ago, the party was led by a level three or four halfling called Hiba. They killed half the orcs on level one of the dungeon and intimidated the rest into handing over most of the treasure. The next session, another halfling claiming to be “Hiba’s evil brother” was with a party intimidating the orcs into handing over the last of their treasure. I think it would be fair to say that any orc encounter with a party containing a halfling are no longer combat encounters, unless the orcs are at a significant disadvantage. Perhaps we can have orcs hissing and booing as the party passes through. 😆
– Alex 2022-09-07 06:08 UTC
