Saturday, March 9, 2013

Smugglers in the Dark: Dungeon Setup

Here is the card-based dungeon mechanics I will use to continue the Smugglers in the Dark adventure. From a standard deck of playing cards, I will use the following: one red and one black of each face card (jacks, queens, kings) and numbers 2-7. One card is drawn at the beginning of a turn when the party is moving further into the dungeon:

  • Face cards mean that a new room is entered and an encounter happens, focused on a given character, Jack: Eryz, Queen: Swyem, King: Ingont. The nature of the event is defined using the event focus and event meaning systems from Mythic.
  • Number cards require a roll of a ten-sided die. If the result is greater than the card number, the new area is a corridor or passageway. Otherwise, it is a new room, filled according to the "stocking the room" rules on the Basic game.
The number of doors found in a room or corridor, including the one used to enter that section of the dungeon, is given by the roll of one six-sided die: 1-2: 2 doors, 3-4: 3 doors, 5-6: 4 doors. Each door will be locked on a roll of 1-2 on a six-sided die.

The color of the card will be used to indicate the kind of encounter, when applicable. Red cards indicate a conflict of physical nature (combat, obstacles, traps to dodge etc.) while black cards are related to mental conflicts (social interactions, puzzles, traps to disarm etc.)


If the adventurers spend more than two turns in the same location, I will make a check for wandering monsters. For this adventure, the wandering monsters are kobolds, and their number is given by the roll of one six-sided die: 1: a single kobold, 2-4: two kobolds, 5-6: three kobolds. However, for every previous encounter with wandering monsters, a +1 modifier is added to the roll.

After six cards have been drawn, one joker is added and the cards are reshuffled. When the joker is then drawn, the players have reached their objective -- the stolen magical trinkets.

3 comments:

Fitz-Badger said...

cool
I will be interested to see how this plays out.

Spacejacker said...

I really like your focus system, very clever!

Ricardo Nakamura said...

Thanks for the comments! @Spacejacker: it was inspired by Fiasco, where each scene is alternately focused on one character.