Jason Lutes My players are about to wrap up their first dungeon and head back to town, and I had a question.

Jason Lutes My players are about to wrap up their first dungeon and head back to town, and I had a question.

Jason Lutes My players are about to wrap up their first dungeon and head back to town, and I had a question. How are you using the “Passing time” move in your game? As written, it looks like every character makes the move individually when they get back to town to see if they get any downtime moves or if their week is interrupted. With six players, I’m thinking that I’ll probably have more than one 6-. Do you often have more than one settlement activity happening during a given downtime week?

8 thoughts on “Jason Lutes My players are about to wrap up their first dungeon and head back to town, and I had a question.”

  1. It is written for each character to make the move individually. So far we haven’t had too many overlapping events, but it’s only seen a little bit of play at our table (which currently only has 4 players, so less chance of overlapping events than with 6).

    I have been tempted to rewrite it as something like:

    PASS TIME

    When you and your companions spend one week of downtime in a settlement, each of you must pay one week’s cost of living, and one volunteer rolls +Peace: on a 10+, nothing unusual occurs, and each person can make a downtime move of their choice; on a 7-9, each person can make a downtime move of their choice, but a settlement event occurs at the end of the week; on a 6-, do not mark XP, and a settlement event occurs 1d6 days into the week. Any settlement event that occurs centers on the person who volunteered.

  3. My sessions are time-constrained (4 hours per week per group), and we like to spend as much time as possible in the wild or in dungeons. We therefore roll PASS TIME as a group, roll DOWNTIME MOVES individually, and play out SETTLEMENT EVENTS as a group.

    Prior to adopting this method, I had one group spend an entire session in “solo adventures” that spun off from the pass time rolls.

  4. Well, I didn’t get a chance to try out the group Pass Time move last night. Rather than pull their dwarf fighter back through the magical portal, this band of 1st level characters decided to all go through it instead… They are now many, many days away from their base, exploring the blasted crater of a god-destroyed ancient city, so I’m guessing theyr won’t be seeing town for a while (if ever). Fun session, though!

  6. I did my usual “desperately rolling up the bare minimum necessary to improvise off of during lunch the day of the game” prep 🙂 I pulled out a couple of saved Dyson Logos maps:

    rpgcharacters.wordpress.com – [Tuesday Map] Ruins at Namurta’s Halls

    https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/friday-map-under-namurtas-halls/

    and used the tables in Perilous Wilds to generate themes, discoveries, and dangers. I already knew who built the ruins (our ancient culture the VaxilDans – it was tied into the first dungeon by the magical portal [also randomly generated]), and what the ruins were (during our setting generation we had determined that the VaxilDans had been destroyed when they angered their gods. We had randomly generated a map location called “The Crater of the God” which I decided would be the old capital city reduced to mostly rubble and fused, glassy sands by their angry god).

    For themes I rolled up: Factions at war, Holy War (!), Secrets/treachery, and Arcane research. I was able to reincorporate a bunch of these with later random rolls.

    For Discoveries I got: Trinkets, Scroll/Book. Locked gate/portal, puzzle, and magic pool/statue. The locked gate was the one way magical portal that brought them to the city. They ran into the magic pool in the cellar of the ruined temple on the map. It was full of magically animated colorful glass piranha like fish.

    For Dangers I got: Creature eating (imp), Magical Trap, Creature looking for food (giant rats), High Priest (he’s the one doing the arcane research to try and reconnect with the god), Creature returning to den (Kobolds), Creature sleeping (a smoke dinosaur – I love random tables!), and an Ambush trap.

    I decide that the kobolds were at war with the smoke dinosaur and had built traps around the ruins.

    The players ended up exploring the temple/church on the map first. The evil thief set off a magical trap that confused her (INT damage). They found some relics in the altar. They found the magic pool in the cellar (why was there a magic pool full of animated glass piranha in the cellar of the temple? Who knows.) They explored the catacombs and decided not to desecrate the graves (i ripped off the Roman catacombs and had portraits of the deceased painted on each cell, including children, which gave them pause). They found a kobold tunnel leading off the catacombs (which I added to the map), and made so much noise that the kobolds were waiting for them and battle ensued. They killed the kobolds, and one of the halfling fighters set off a rock fall trap narrowly avoiding being crushed, which is where we left things.

    I find that having the map and the few notes (above) that I generated is plenty for me to riff off of. The interesting randomly generated bits are in the back of my mind while running, so when I need to come up with something, I use them as inspiration and try to incorporate them into a (mostly) coherent whole.

  7. Aah! Smoke dinosaur v. kobolds! Too good. Is the fumisaur insubstantial, or does it just exhude smoke? Why do the kobolds want to kill it, I wonder?

    Thanks for the report. You’ve got some seriousawesome old-school D&D weirdness going on there. I hearing about how people improv off of and integrate random bits.

    So they have yet to encounter the high priest? Sounds like this ruined city has a built-in archvillain.

  8. Yes, I’m  planning on the High Priest being the big bad.  They’ve only seen about 20% of the area yet, so lots more to encounter.  As for the smoke dinosaur, I have no idea yet!  I’m leaning towards insubstantial, but what does a sleeping insubstantial smoke dinosaur look like?  I like being as surprised as the players at how these things turn out 🙂  BTW – the glass piranhas came from a quick random roll (that I asked the players to make) on the ‘Magical Pool” table in the Dungeon Alphabet book.  The hunchbacked, rotten toothed, turban wearing female Dwarf magic-user caught one and has it wriggling around in her turban now 🙂

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