The Warrens of Mystery, Zone B

Continuing with the Warrens of Mystery, with over 200 rooms their is a lot to cover...

Zone A creates a natural bottleneck resulting in two choices - the door to the south and the open passageway to the west. In both my playthroughs players have opted to go west as their first choice (the open passage invites another step where a door is a choice), leaving the south door unopened.

This next zone, Zone B, I refer to as The Junction. At its centre is a crossroad on what my players have referred to as the top corridor. This natural passage on the top of the map allows players to quickly traverse multiple map zones to reach deeper into the warrens.

The theme here is Visitors. A small Visitor group have occupied most of the rooms in this area and seek to hack into the Vault in this region. They have a guard post setup right in the middle of the junction that allows them to control traffic through the top of the map. They can be reasoned with but tend to be hostile to Humans and Endjinns (their hated enemies that caused the worldship to crash).

My first group to play through this area went with open assault, attacking the group at location 1, then the reinforcements from 2 then 6 in a glorious rolling battle. They then advanced through to 4 and eliminated the leader. The second group set an ambush, quickly cleared the main group, and went north before reinforcements could arrive. Both groups had recovered the vault key from Zone A which opens the Vault on this map. I describe the vault entries as a 10ft square raised platform with a pedestal in the middle. Placing the key within opens a hole in the roof and activates this flying platform (as an elevator) that rises rapidly upwards and takes them to the Vault. Zone A and B effectively teach the players about the vaults and gives them an understanding of how finding and opening them works.

The worldship arrives in your world...

I was once asked which ‘world’ my setting was in and to be honest I use my own. But it got me thinking, how would you use it in another world?

For this thought I’m going to assume the ship is and has been in poor repair for an extended period. This allows you to use my map below as is. I only really use one deck of the whole ship as I assume lower decks are buried and upper decks extend beyond the atmosphere of a world.  Your can simply run with it being the only pressurised deck if you don't crash it. Assume the Visitor kingdoms are intact, but the human occupants would be optional to use.

Maybe I will explore an undamaged map in the future with multiple decks. Though if you did this the whole ship would likely follow the rules for the visitor territories I currently use.

So how does it did the ship arrive in your world?

The world scar

Like in my world the ship crashes onto your world. You will need to consider how the crash didn’t destroy your world, be it local magic or technology on the now crashed ship. This could have happened a long time ago or it could be a recent campaign event. Where did it crash? What did it destroy? It is big enough to wipe out all or part of a whole kingdom. In Kanahu this could be directly off the map in the sea to the west or south west or in the unknown lands to the east.

The district nine problem (but bigger)

The ship arrives and is floating a mile above the terrain. It’s still functional gravity systems maintain it in a static position over your world. Or maybe it drifts following some pattern? What happens to the terrain underneath? The worldship is massive and would block out the sun killing all plant life underneath! If this is a recent arrival and kingdom underneath will be rushing to have it moved assuming their people haven’t already fled. If it has been there a long time a dark land underneath will be dead and decayed, maybe becoming a place filled with long dead cities to plunder.

The new moon (it's really a space station)

A more distant arrival, a new moon arrives in the heavens and strange visitors arrive stealing resources and people for purposes unknown. With the aid of an astronomer the moon is identified as a vessel of some kind, do your players explore it? They could use a teleport spell or kidnap a visitor ship to arrive onboard. Do they encounter humans from a distant world or are the Visitor remnants the only survivors?

Combinations (the Sokovia solution) 

Combining world scar with a new moon above. Is a solution to a world ending event in your campaign one where your players or some other force deliberately seeks to crash the ship into a kingdom or location with the intent to destroy it? How would they do this? what are the implcations? 

Maybe the crash is going to occur in a year, the new moon will fall! Can the players stop it? 

My efforts to revise the map

I have been playing with worldographer recently and have made a few icons to differentiate the workshops terrain. They have started doing small updates and the recent changes have improved the user experience for me, though I think more is needed still. Asside from the new icons below I have also added some fungus areas as a forest proxy in the map to give it a bit more texture. For these fungus forests I focused them away from the more inhabited front of the ship. The new hexes are explained below the map.

My current progress is as follows:

The Worldship 6 mile hex revised map

Plaza: plaza hexes are dominated by giant mile high and wide corridors with natural terrain beneath. They are often illuminated with sun lamps and make natural passageways through the vessel. They are similar to the blank machinery areas but are dominated by the plaza terrain types.

Hab-cylinder: these giant cylinders six miles wide and high provide unique terrains from alien worlds within. The map icons show them as fertile or conducive to human life or as zones that are infertile or hostile to life. These were originally detailed in my first map here with the starting city of Avril being in a prominant cylinder.

Hanger bay: these massive open structures have access hangers to the outside world where visitor fleets once berthed. Many opens underneath the vessel and if it has crashed landed will now be filled with dirt and are mainly inaccessible.

The Warrens of Mystery, Zone A

Rather than having dungeon "levels" in the Warrens I use zones. The deeper the players go the harder the zones become. For each zone I create a cheat sheet for play, a one page summary of that area.

The zone below is the main starting area I have used for both my groups, technically there are other potential starting areas but I created this as I went. 

There is no particular theme for this zone, though a large Bog'an nest in the entry themes that area. To make this encounter harder cause a cascade effect as the Bog'ans from other rooms flow through, or release the lizard in room 10 and have the Bog'ans fall back as it does its job. It was mostly randomly generated using the standard tables in ACKS and my monster random table previously covered. The encounter/restock number represents a dungeon level 2 table roll with a modifier of -3 to the d12 roll for the monster encounter level. 

I have no idea if this will work but I think the following code imbeds the PDF. I tend to run with a few key words and detail, so I don't have to read massive amounts of text as I am running the game and this sheet reflects this. I may expand on some of the flavour elements in future posts.

The Warrens of Mystery

For the last... eight months my group switched to video play over discord to keep our gaming fun alive. To keep things simple, I went back to basics and setup a mega-dungeon for play. Here I use Gimp to create a layer over the top of the map that I can erase as they explore to reveal room. It has worked surprisingly well and has been a great play experience over discord.

After eight months both of my groups are near the end, they have opened each about five vaults with wildly different results based on party composition and approach. The fun thing for me the last few months has been seeing how radically different groups get wildly different results from the interactions of monsters and factions in the dungeon. 

The dungeons premise is that there are six hidden vaults that can be opened with keys and have hidden treasures in them. There is also a master vault that can be opened with all six keys (something my players have only recently learned). I revealed this through a session zero and through interactions with factions and groups in the dungeons.

Below is the blank map to this dungeon that I drew in March. I have split it into sections of 15-25 rooms and the deeper you go the harder it gets. Over the next few months, I will post the "one-page" summaries of these zones.

I used a hex grid here mainly because my second play group is my home group and my old battlemap is worn on the square grid side. The hex side though has never been used so I thought I would get some life out of it. It also strangely represents the BCK inspired sci-fi elements of my hybrid game that is set on the worldship very nicely.

The Warrens of Mystery

Near the village of Avril rumours have circulated of a recently located visitor vault being opened in the nearby warrens. Strange people dressed in cloaks have come to the village to trade goods in pristine condition that are rarely seen. These goods are surely from a hidden vault, and where there is one vault there are often more to be found. Scouts of house Avril have traced them to a region inhabited known to be inhabited vagrant bog’ans, barbarians, bugfolk and ogres. The have noted also that recent patrols of visitor’s keen on uncovering the vaults hidden within have been spotted in the region.

Parties of adventures have stared the journey to these warrens in recent times to uncover the keys to these vaults and unlock the treasure withing, but many have never returned. Will you brave the dangers of the warrens to unlock its hidden treasures?

The Warrens of Mystery blank map