Occult West, a record of what happened to Death Valley

So I love the setting and aesthetic of the videogame Hunt: Showdown.
I also really enjoy running horror themed games.

Lately I have been toying with the idea of doing my own take on the premise of Hunt, and idea that I've simply been letting simmer on the back on my mind to see if it might happen to coalesce into something cool and/or interesting sooner or later.

One of these days I ended up editing together a map for it based on the national park of Death Valley:

 

Rules-wise Luke Gearing's Violence serves as a good base and starting point to start pondering off of, so that base is quite nicely covered.

 

And today I ended up digging a bit deeper into the lore of Hunt and mining it for ideas as to how to frame the game now that I already had a map for it. The vague idea I've had since putting together the map has been to take the idea of "this area is full of weird and scary shit, so sane people don't go there but you can make money by going in".
Very Stalker-esque, but more of a focus on the occult than on the truly bizarre "reality breaking down" thing that Stalker and Roadside Picnic do.

So, here I will now present the first draft.

 

What Happened to Death Valley

Miners.
Miners happened to Death Valley.
Something was dug up from within the mines.
Something that with it, brought a plague.
Plague that would go on to inflict slow and wasting deaths on first the mine workers, then those in town, and spread from there with doctors and wild animals until a full blown epidemic began to rear it's head.

Some weeks after the first deaths from this new affliction had occurred, a new threat emerged. Those that had died of the plague would no longer stay dead, instead clawing their way up from the ground they were buried in. Returning as violent and single minded echoes of the men and women they once were.

Through medical examinations of the walking dead, a thick black phlegm was found where blood would circulate in a healthy and normal person.
Similar black mucus had been observed in those infected with the plague prior to their inevitable deaths.

As time went on and the epidemic reached it's peak, more monstrosities would begin to appear within Death Valley.
Those dead of the infection would walk once more as twisted mockeries of their former selves, one more horrid than the last. Some no longer even recognisable as the humans they previously were. Reduced to unnatural monsters.

By this point the epidemic had to be acknowledged.
The states of both Nevada and California have since put up a bounty on anyone and -thing, be they a man, a woman, a child, or an animal that comes from Death Valley for the area had now come to truly and fully embody it's name.

Rise of Factions

Supernatural Hunters Association

With the public acknowledgement of what had come to transpire within Death Valley, one man stood forth to offer a different explanation.
This plague was no plague at all, but the work of an otherworldly entity. A Demon of some kind. The type that would bring woe to ancient civilisations in the past, and that was now allegedly rearing it's head on the border between Nevada and California.

This man came with not only apparent knowledge of the adversary, but confidence and a proposition of a plan.
An association of hunters with natural resilience to the forces of evil that now ravaged the lands, backed by him and his research on the subject of this unseen force of death would be allowed entry and return to and from Death Valley where they would search for where this demon had first breached from the realm of Hell to the realm of the living in order to seal such wound and keep further evil from escaping to our lives.
Manage this, and what remains of the forces of evil within Death Valley could be, given enough time, culled and weeded out.

Occult Practitioners

While less public, another group of individuals were also now fixing their attention to the valley. A loosely bound band of occult researchers, scholars and practitioners. And murderers.
The types that orchestrate serial disappearances and killings, only caught when they forget to practice enough care. The types that had sought out to, and succeeded in confirming the existence of Hell or at least something comparable beyond the realm of the living.
The types that were all brought together by the discovery of one. A discovery that had allowed them to forcibly construct folks resistant to the type of Evil that had overcome Death Valley. A blood ritual and an injection distilled through means better left unmentioned that would drain all warmth from a man, but through which anyone could be made resistant and thus able to venture within the valley if only they were strong or desperate enough to bear the many side effects.

While less organised and thus lacking clear leadership or chain of command, it is whispered that the penultimate goal of these practitioners is to wrestle unto their control the evil that currently inhabits Death Valley.

Pacific Coast Borax Company

While the SHA and the practitioners of the occult arts were in a race to containing or controlling the source of the Death Valley epidemic, one more notable force had it's eyes set on not the valley itself, but rather what could yet be reaped from within it.
At this point in time Death Valley was one of the main American sources of borax, a crystalline solid that among it's many uses was sought after as a flux used in welding iron and steel.
The valley floor housed two prominent borax works operating off of the rich deposits found within the "Devil's Golf Course", now rendered inoperable due to the spreading epidemic.

The Pacific Coast Borax Company had began exploiting it's vast wealth to search for a solution to keep the deposits exploited and the borax works in operation.
The temporary solutions and countermeasures they had managed to arrive at were naught but amateur's meddlings compared to those available to members of the Supernatural Hunters Association or their competition, but with the wealth afforded by the PCB the inefficiency in their methods could be patched over by money and quantity.

Protected by charms and effigies handed out in sealed boxes, PCB commissioned hunters could be seen setting foot into Death Valley with ease of entry and exit from the area guaranteed by the company they represented.
The efforts of these men and women would center around purging those taken by the epidemic around the borax mines and processing works, escorting workers in for short amounts of time when the risk of infection had been lowered enough, and keeping the mines operational even if their yield would not be able to hold a candle to their output prior to the outbreak that had swept over Death Valley.

Chain-Creating Freaks & Fancies - Another blogging challenge

If there are two things I enjoy, then late night posting and bandwagons includes at least one of the them.

On our darling OSR server on the discord side of things I was egged on to try to get another bandwagon, or "a blogging challenge" as they call them nowadays, off the ground.

Ghru from Dark Souls 3, my inspiration for using goatmen

How did we get here?

This all stemmed from a conversation about using "un-vanilla" creatures. As in, taking something like the goblins in the gatehouse of Stonehell and instead running them as lanky goat-men with crowns of tangled horns growing from their heads, or other types of "re-skinning" of things in a similar matter.

From there the conversation continued to drift onwards to creating new things altogether, and how that really is just riffing off of things as well.
And that is not a bad thing, seeing something cool and going "This is cool, I wanna make something based off of it!" is a perfectly fine attitude to have especially in a hobby where we're just making (hopefully cool) stuff up to show to our players.

So, I challenge whoever comes after me to do exactly that, don't worry about originality or anything like that too much and just make something fun out of something cool you find.
Or in this case, something cool I found for you.

The Challenge - Chain-Creating Freaks & Fancies

This really is as simple as:
I will now share what I think is something that looks cool with you.
You will take that something and create some gameable piece from it. A monster, an npc, a magic item, a dungeon, a village. Whatever you think befits the thing.
Once you are done you write it into a blogpost, linking back to this one, and at the end of that blogpost you will share something that you think looks cool.
And whoever comes after you will then take your something and write a gameable piece based from it, linking back to your post.
And we will keep repeating this until someone drops the collective ball.

Or if this goes wild and blows up somehow, all of yous take my cool thing and create something from it and then when you share it in your blog you include something you find cool and we'll keep having these prompts multiply exponentially.

One or the other.

My "something cool"

Okay, I have something that I found quite cool. Mermaids in what to me looks almost like swamp water. Based on this, give me freaks or give me fancies.

Now let's see if this one will sink or swim.

Mermaids, by Alayne on Artstation
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Al3Jxo

This challenge has since been taken on by Mr.Mann of the Foot of the Blue Mountain blog.
Follow the chain over there if you wish to find the out what he has left behind for others.

Rules and rulings I've been using lately

While doing my routinely alt-tabbing between youtube and discord I realised that I have a small document gathered up of commonly used rules and rulings that I've though significant enough to write down for ease of reference.
So I thought why not share them to the interwebs to be gawked at and picked apart by strangers!

Of course these are just major ones that have been written down by myself, and there likely are a number of smaller things that didn't make it to the post or even the document I keep these noted down in.

God has Left

Each couple of months of irl time Cleric Spells are counted as being at one level lower that they normally would. (ie. Lvl.5 Cleric would cast their spells as if they were lvl.4 one month after the disappearance of Varchic)
No more new clerics are allowed to be made.

Promises to Saints

To offset the loss of clerics, anyone can proclaim promises to Saints.
You must know of the saint in the first place.
You make a promise to the Saint, related to one of the things associated with them, in order to gain a favor from the Saint.
Breaking a promise made to a Saint results in a punishment.
E.g. You promise to the saint of firefighters to stop smoking for good in exchange for the favour of the saint watching over your house to make sure it doesn't burn down

HP, Combat & Wounds

HP represents one's ability to stay standing and push past injuries, rather than "meat points".
You'll still manage to run around with your guts hanging out as long as you have the HP to keep you going through the pain.
Max damage roll gets to nominate a wound on target.
Defender either accepts the wound or tells how they deflect it and at what cost.

Random Encounters

Whenever the players suspect they have triggered a random encounter, anyone may proclaim "I choose Rapture" to instead encounter Rapture.
The character of the player who chose Rapture experiences and encounter with it.
(From: Veins of the Earth)

Night encounters

Two watches per night.
People declare what they want to do during a watch, only people actively keeping watch are geared and and ready to rumble should shit hit the fan. Others only have one thing on hand upon waking up. And no, you aren't sleeping in your armour.
Resting for a watch recovers 1hp.
One of the players on watch rolls d6, on 1 there is encounter | Known Encounter
Same time GM rolls another d6, if the result is same as player d6, there is encounter | Surprise Encounter

Dungeon Blues & Passage of Real Time

Ending a session in a dungeon or otherwise in the middle of action means that no time will pass for the PCs between sessions, while the outside world continues on.
This can lead to situations where the PCs start a delve one session, finish it the next, and leave the dungeon to find several weeks if not months have passed.
(From: Songbirds 3e)

Henchmen

Gain xp at half the rate of PCs.
Ask for half a person's share of treasure as payment.
GM can/will roll morale for henchmen when applicable, usually after party suffers losses or if the henchmen are asked to do something blatantly dangerous.
Player can keep henchmen of up to total combined level equalling to PC level, modified by CHA mod.
Henchmen are a public resource vs PCs that are private to a player, akin to a shared character.
Specific PC has to bring them along, but after that even if the player who brought the henchman along isn't present on some session of the delve the rest of the party can use the henchmen as they see fit.
Henchmen don't get the option of rolling starting funds but instead gotta use the starting gear table.

Note: henchmen rules are something I am still to this day very unsure of, mainly because I do not wish to get all nitty gritty about exact types of torchbearers who'll only carry lights for the party and luggage boys who'll only carry loot or gear for the party and animal handlers who'll only help keep the horses happy for the party and all of these having specific wages they'll ask. Why not just treat them as general helpfuls who get promised a share of the treasure and call it a day?
Additionally, at least in the Lamentations rules that I base my games on I don't remember seeing a mention of how many henchmen a single PC can employ, but personally I think this should in some capacity be limited.
In short, I'm not quite sure if I am satisfied with this iteration of henchmen rules that I am currently leaning on.

Art by me, because blogposts without images look boring

Hunger Tide, or what happens when the land grows starved for too long

Flocks of carrion birds, bands of starving wolves, men and women with nowhere left to go and nothing left to sustain themselves on, all living as a single pack.
When enough of them gather together, simply brutalising each other or snatching cattle from nearby settlements will no longer suffice for sustaining them.
Pangs of hunger take over, drowning out both reason and fear alike as the Hunger Tide takes to villages, travellers and even entire towns.

Forming of a Tide

A typical Hunger Tide will form either because of famines among the locals, over-hunting of forests, or after natural disasters.
Animals, men and women find themselves starved to the point that all common taboos weight less than one's own continued survival. Neighbour digs up someone recently passed, not letting the flesh go to waste. A wolfpack brutalises it's own cubs and weak in order to sustain itself. Carrion birds descent down on those still clinging on to life. All are driven by nothing but hunger.

Transcending such preconceived notions as species or friend and foe, a mutually beneficial relationship forms between those simply looking to survive. Men abandons reason and language, wolf abandons care and familial ties, a crow becomes bold and an owl will hunt through both day and night.
Men and women are the bait, stopping caravans and stumbling into villages. They'll use their knowledge of society to lead their packs to new venues of sustenance.
Wolves appear soon after, hounding and corralling the prey as they ensure that none escape. Those trying to act by themselves get snatched, likely starting in-fights within the pack about who gets to eat the first catches.
All the while birds have been gathering, ready to gouge eyes and wreck havoc among those trying to stay organised.

In their wake, villages lay still and lifeless. Caravans are raided with none of the goods taken or even touched. Only bones are left behind, thoroughly gnawed and pecked with not a scrap of meat wasted.

Determining the size of a Hunger Tide

Wildmen - 1d6 x 2d6
Murder of Wings - 1d6 + 1 Read Beak for every two flocks
Wolves - 3d6 + 1 Men-Eater for every 6 wolves

Driven by Starvation - The pack forms over a common sense of hunger, but that doesn't mean they won't still need to sate that hunger somehow if they cannot catch prey.
After each week during which the pack hasn't had enough food to satiate it's members it will lose 1d6 HD worth of it's own either to starvation or from eating it's members, and counts as Hungry in terms of determining their morale until they next get to gorge themselves.
Food Intake - If the amount of food the pack requires is not being handwaved, 1HD of victims will feed 2HD of pack members for a week.

Murder of Wings

Hungry flock of crows, owls, vultures and the likes.
HD: 2d6+2
HP: 4 per HD, each hp corresponds to single avian
AC: 16
ML: 5 (10 if Hungry)
ATT: 4x per round @ +1 for d6 dmg
Eye Gougers - Every hit blinds the victim in one eye. Victim must pass a Con check each morning to restore eyesight, failing three times means the eye is permanently blinded.
- Three successful gouges, or a nat20, on single target means the eye has been removed.

Red Beak

Single crow covered in scars and with feathers missing, it's beak is perpetually stained brown and red from old blood which makes it easy to spot amidst it's airborne flock.
HD: 2
HP: 10
AC: 16
ML: 5 (10 if Hungry)
ATT: Eye Gouge @ +4 for 1d6 dmg
Eye Gouger - Every hit blinds the victim in one eye. Victim must pass a Con check each morning to restore eyesight, failing three times means the eye is permanently blinded.
- Three successful gouges, or a nat20, on single target means the eye has been removed.

Wolves

Tangled fur, hollowed ribcages and impeccable teamwork to split, isolate and dismay their prey.
HD: 3
HP: 14
AC: 14
ML: 8 (11 in Hungry)
ATT: Bite @ +4 for 2d4 dmg

Men-Eater

When a wolf grows disproportionately large it will need more and more food to sustain itself, such wolves sometimes get called Men-Eaters for they are perfectly ready to pounce even an armed hunter or armoured caravan guard to sate that need for food.
HD: 7
HP: 35
AC: 14
ML: 12 (retreats out of necessity, not of fear)
ATT: 2x Bite @ +7 for 2d8+1 dmg

Wildmen (& Women)

Men and women that have tossed away their humanity, now driven by instinct, indistinguishable from their pack of Hunger. Incidentally, this is also as close as one will get to a druid while still lacking the understanding of those who voluntarily discard language and civilisation.
Hides wrestled, bitten and devoured off of those who tried to oppose their position within the pack and feathers plucked from those that mocked their origins, they have truly discarded all emotion but that of simple need.
HD: 1
HP: 6
AC: 16
ML: 6 (10 if Hungry)
ATT: Improvised Weapon @ +2 for 1d6 dmg

 

Recalled from Action - Report

 I made a challenge and here I am doing it myself now, so I'll proceed to explain to y'all how I ran a scene that I haven't run.

The system that I didn't use to run this scene is the same I use to run most of my tables with, using Lamentations of the Flame Princess as the baseline with rulings and random fancies thrown in here and there as applicable. 

What follows is a fake play report, which turned out to be a rather fun little excercise as well in figuring out how I might have handled a fight like that. I tried justifying things with game mechanics where applicable and figuring out how I would have ruled some of the more unorthodox things that happened in the fight.

I hope it feels believeable and not too forced, and maybe you can even pick up an idea or two from all of this.

For bit of context, our PC Guts has been on the run from a force of knights and got cornered at the dead end of a winding city street.

He has mowed down knight after knight with his massive two-hander of a sword very onesidedly to the point that the knights have lost their morale which has lead to a standstill in the fighting.

The knights still having a numbers advantaged, I ruled that they haven't fled despite having broken their morale but at this point were just standing there, weapons still meekly pointed towards Guts the PC and if he would have stepped forwards the knights would have let him pass for the sake of keeping their own lives.

Now however, the knight captain arrives at the scene. The rest of his troops will not back him up after having just broken morale, but he of course doesn't know this.

The timing of his arrival is unfortunate, but I had used a d6 to determine how many rounds it would take for him to finally get here and had rolled a full 6 meaning that Guts had all the time he needed to weed out the regular knights first.

Nothing too spectacular here, as the knight captain steps in the situation doesn't quite immediately devolve back into a fight but rather he attempts to intimidate the PC out of the fight by boasting the difference in the height and build of the two.

However upon seeing that just the threat of violence isn't enough to make Guts the PC to back down the captain decides to escalate the situation and attempts to mash the large two-handed sword that Guts the PC is holding straight out of his grip.

To the player of course I described the large military pickaxe the knight captain was holding and how he deliberately raised it up and was readying a swing, which prompted an action from the player which in turn prompted an initiative roll to see which party is faster.

Since this is essentially a 1v1 situation, we used d6 + DEX mod for the initiative rolls for both sides. The knight captain of course didn't have any sort of statline at this point so I quickly rolled a 3d6 to see if he had a modifier or not.

The dice were cast and the knight captain won initiative.

The knight captain finishes the swing at the blade of Guts the PC.

I believe I was ruling this as non-lethal damage that on max damage roll would have disarmed the PC since it certainly wasn't quite something that would have fallen under grappling/wrestling.

The attack did however miss and as such the only thing damaged or sent flying was bits of the cobblestone pavement.

However this guy is no pushover, they're a captain and thus have two attacks per round.

Seeing as the disarm attempt failed, the captain decided to Press his next attack.

For those not familiar with the concept, in LotFP Fighters have access to two combat "manouvers", or rather methods of fighting/attacking. Pressed attacks give +2 to hit but make the attacker suffer -4 to AC untill the next time they act, and Defensive attacks give -4 to hit but provide +2 to AC for the attacker untill they next act.

Since the rest of the regular knights had already broken morale they were pretty much just expendable set pieces and thus I thought I'd highlight the brutality of the captain's fighting style by having his second attack force his own men to step aside out of the way or get impaled by the pickaxe as well.

The attack would land, but Guts the PC is a Fighter who has not yet acted this round so I reminded the player that if they wanted to they can spend this round's action to Parry the attack.

For those not familiar with LotFP, anyone who has not acted on the round can declare to parry an attack made at them to temporarily increase their AC at the cost of their action for the round. For non-fighters this is a +2 to AC, whereas for fighters this is a +4 to AC.

At this point however the player informed me that even with a parry the attack would just barely hit them so I offered them a bargain:

Either Guts the PC takes the hit that they can already see coming their way, or if they use the parry I'll allow them to avoid the damage but they will have to tell me how avoiding it put them in a worse off situation as a trade-off.

The player decided they didn't want to risk a high roll from what they had intuited to be a d10 as the knight captain was similiarily to Guts the PC handling a heavy two-handed weapon.

As such, the player nominated that while avoiding the attack their character had been cornered and now couldn't run away from the fight.

Boths sides have now acted.

Knight captain with his two attacks, and Guts the PC with his parry.

New round ensues and initiative is re-rolled.

The knight captain went first again.

Another pressed attack from the knight captain, both because I had figured he'd be rather pissed off at this point and because he needed everything he could get to break through that +4 AC from a fighter parry that Guts the PC's player could use to defend with.

Knight captain rolled a 21 for their attack, something that not even Guts the PC could manage to parry with their AC of 16.

I was already rolling for the damage when the player asked me something that I couldn't turn down. Could they try to do the thing that the knight captain did at the beginning of the fight where they tried to mash the weapon off of Guts the PC's hands?

When your player gives you fire like that you can only pull through with it.

There was already a set example of a similiar manouver within the same fight too, and the PC hadn't acted yet.

I ended up ruling that if Guts the PC can with his own attack beat the 21 that the knight captain had rolled, he'd get to roll damage for his weapon and then reduce the incoming damage from the knight captain's blow by that amount.

Which the player proceeded to do. 22 beats 21, 10 damage reduced!

Seeing as Guts the PC's player's 10 managed to beat the 6 damage I had rolled the knight captain's attack to inflict when the player had asked me about this crazy manouver Guts the PC came out of this exchange unscathed.

Furthermore, since they had rolled a max result on the counter swing, I decided that instead of just simply deflecting the blow the weight and strength of the two-hander that Guts the PC was wielding was enough to reduce the knight captain's warpick unusable as it's metal shaft bent backwards and it's sharp blade shattered from the force of impact.

At this point I figured that even though he hadn't lost any hp yet in the fight, the knight captain probbaly should roll morale since he had just had his weapon rendered absolutely and utterly unusable.

He failed his roll.

At this point the entire force of the knights had failed their morale checks, even the captain having lost his will to fight.

Normally I might have still had the knight captain pull off his second attack that he hadn't used yet this round but I figured with the failed morale check he'd have had enough of this fiasco for now.

As such, we dropped initiative but I did still allow the player to roll another attack against the knight captain now laying on the pavement and covered in large beads of cold sweat.

"Just something to kinda sell the whole message you know, I'm gonna kick his teeth in and try to scare the knights off now that I've beaten their boss."

Max damage. Granted with a kick so it's still just 2 damage but does drive home the point.

Just to be on the safe side, I rolled reaction for the rest of the knights to see if they'd still at least stand their ground or if half of them were already runing at this point.

Snake eyes! They must have not liked seeing their captain kicked around like that.

From there on things moved along and surprisingly it didn't result in combat but rather an escape by Guts the PC despite the knights having regained some fighting spirit, but that is outside of the scope of this blogpost or even this writing challenge really.

reCalled from Action - Blogging Challenge

 Or how I had a cool idea that I wanted to turn into a blogging bandwagon because by god I need to write more of these.

I'll also be compiling takes on this prompt/challenge to this post as I either come across them or am informed of them so de feel free to check back here every now and then.
So far myself,  Havoc of Lonely Star blog, Mr.Mann of The Foot of Blue Mountain blog, diregrizzlybear and Justin H of Aboleth Overlords have taken the challenge for a spin.

I would also like to apologise in advance, the formatting of images is not exactly one of blogger's strong points so I couldn't make this post look exactly super pretty. Hopefully it should still be readable and not go too janky on mobile view or anything of the sort.

The what now?

So this is an idea I stumbled myself into after witnessing another user on the OSR discord server going over their re-read of Berserk and talking about it's fight scene of Guts facing off against Lord Zondark and how some of the things that happen in the fight might translate to stuff players could do during combat in a tabletop rpg.

You wouldn't believe how difficult formatting this on blogger was,
there's no way to make text wrap around images

Some amount of spitballing ensued, and I wanted to try getting people on board with this for couple of different reasons.

Firstly, there really isn't that much player-facing advice out and about on the osr blogging circles, or if there is I have ran into pretty much exactly none of it, and I figured something like this could kinda be used to highlight to the players how you can pull off all sorts of cool stunts in a fight in order to attemp to level the playing field instead of just resorting to the "I hit you, you hit me, I hit you, you hit me" that I find B/X combat can often devolve into.

Secondly, I thought it would be really interesting to get to take a peek inside the heads of different GMs and see how they approach adjudicating these type of more unorthodox fighting manouvers in whatever syster, hack of one, or other amalgamation of rules and procedures they use to run their games with, as well as seeing how two different GMs might adjudicate the same scene with the same ruleset in a completely different manner to kinda highlight how the OSR scene is often more about rulings made during play rather than hard rules recited from a book and a number of GMs aren't afraid to let players pull of cool figting manouvers just because there's no rules precedence for them.

The Challenge

It really is as simple as:

1. Pick a fight scene that isn't just two dudes hitting/shooting each other back and forth. Preferrably something with clever/weird manouvers and unconventional fighting techniques.
2. Run as through how you would have adjudicated the fight, what kind of rulings would you have made to allow the players to pull off all the cool manouvers. 

I would of course love to see as many people as possible run us through the same scene to get to see how differently it would run between numerous systems and GMs.

As such, the scene that sparked this all is from the manga Berserk and takes part during The Guardians of Desire chapter between Guts and Lord Zondark.

Here's the short of it, you can go find it yourself if you'd wish to read around it for more context or just prefer not squinting through series of screenshots on blogger.

Also, how would you run mass combat? Do you got a cool scene that displays all sorts of things that might come up during adjudicating the clashing of armies or just fighting against swarms of mooks?
I would love to see your thoughts on running something like that!

Thoughts on (mega)Dungeons & the experience of crawling them

We all know what a dungeon is, right?
A dungeon can be a hole in the ground, a cave, a crypt, an old abandoned castle or even a full city depending on how it gets framed by the GM. The common denominator in all of these cases being that a dungeon is a hostile environment which a regular sane person wouldn't wish to set foot upon, and from where treasure hunters and the desperate go to and sometimes return from with enough shinies to comfortably sit back and live a good life for a year or two.

What'll follow are some of my musings regarding dungeons and the experience that I personally would wish to evoke among those crawling through them.

 A dungeon should be information warfare

• It should be important to scout the place and try to learn of it in order to understand it's traps and dangers better, thus being able to anticipate and avoid them.
• Initially, decisions are made based on incomplete information and like with a puzzle the PCs keep acquiring new information to fill in their gaps in knowledge untill eventually "mastering" the dungeon.
• As such, planing about future delves should hold some importance other than just making sure the party has enough torches and rations for the coming delve. Different types of gear required for specific paths, traps or even entrances to the dungeon in order to safely traverse the locale.
• The dungeon and it's denizens can likewise learn about and prepare for the party as they delve deeper, creating a kind of tug-of-war between PCs and Dungeon trying to learn more of each other and figure out how to handle and navigate around the dangers they pose to each other

This is something that obviously works the better the larger a dungeon you're working with. A small five room dungeon doesn't have a lot of room for mystery and hidden secrets, let alone to imply them and slowly trickle in information about them for the PCs to find and intuit out.

In a larger dungeon, let's say closer to 20 rooms and all the way up to mega in size there starts to be noeugh breathing room so that you aren't constantly peppring the players with clues about the place as if every room contains five clues and hints to the true nature of the dungeon and it's workings I can see t becoming very exhausting not only for the players to keep track of these things but also for the GM to continue presenting them in a consistent and interesting manner.

TL;DR I want dungeons to be something that can be learned and eventually mastered, if not in their entirety then at least in chunks of certain areas and wings of them. Not "system mastery", but in a sense "mastery over the fiction".