Vivid Worlds Will Kill You

The question “How do I make a fantasy setting feel real?” is one people never really ever stop grappling with. Especially in games.

There is a lot of good input on this topic: have things change over time, create interactions between aspects of the world that don’t involve the players, and borrow judiciously from the real world, which of course everyone has been told is stranger than fiction. 

 

In old school D&D, making an environment feel real is a solved issue, as long as the environment is a dungeon or can be navigated using the dungeon exploration rules. Movement speeds, 10-minute turns, and random encounter procedures are like the enzymes that turn grid-paper maps and sparse room keys into vivid, realized locales—it’s the magic trick that gets so many people hooked on the OSR. 

But dungeons aren’t the same as full settings, and the deeper layers of abstraction used to map and explore an overworld make it harder to bring outdoor environments to life. This is especially the case with imagined environments that have only loose connection to the real world. 

Two non-game works that prominently feature settings of particular vividness: Scavengers Reign, the 2023 sci-fi HBO show known by many of you to be a rare mainstream cultural product inspired by Jean Giraud that has merit beyond just being inspired by Jean Giraud, and Fantastic Planet, a 1973 French and Czech animated film that most of you probably first watched stoned and/or in college.  

If you’ve seen both you probably came to the same conclusion I did, that the latter almost definitely informed the former, at least in terms of setting: they both take place on alien worlds where the worlds themselves, specifically the interactions between organisms and their environment, are more distinctive and memorable than the plots and characters. 

In watching Scavengers Reign when it was airing, and then rewatching Fantastic Planet more recently, I kept asking myself why these settings worked so well. Sure, the camera lingered on weird creatures and landscapes long enough to fix themselves in you mind, but the same can be said for, say, the Star Wars sequel trilogy but not nearly to the same effect.

It turns out it's not the settings themselves but the kinds of stories they support. Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet are both survival narratives, and it’s specifically the survival aspect that makes the ecology of the setting hit harder. 

In other words, each work uses the context of survival as a framework upon which elaborate, imaginative settings are built; the settings convey meaning by way of ecological interactions. Because survival fiction inextricably ties plot to the basic facts of the environment, the genre conventions are well-suited to bring to life fantasy environments in ways no other genre can quite accomplish.  

Let’s take a look at how. 

Scavengers Reign

Scavengers Reign follows survivors in the far future shipwrecked on an alien world. When the show begins, separate groups of survivors are eking out meager existence on the planet Vesta after their ship, the Demeter 227, experiences an ambiguous disaster. In the first episode, a pair of survivors activate the Demeter’s emergency landing protocol, and the disparate survivors witness what remains of the craft slowly make its way to the planet's surface. Each survivor decides to journey to the wreckage, and their adventures through lush environments make up the substance of the show.

Much of the series is spent on the complexity of interrelationships within Vesta’s ecosystems. Character moments and plot beats are interspersed with brief scenes of symbiosis, parasitism, and predation, portrayed in such a way as to highlight the rationality of flora and fauna’s adaptations while underscoring the alienness of the environment. 

In one episode, a brief montage shows the lifecycle of a species of a sort of tree. It begins with a hypodermic tendril extracting DNA from an unsuspecting herd creature, then the gestation of a vegetal simulacrum in a hanging birthing sac, which joins up with the herd only to detonate in an explosion of spore-like seedlings, producing a new stand of trees fed by the bodies of the exploded herd. All of this is shown as lead up to a main character getting stuck by the hypodermic tendril and later a tense scene where his traveling companion is confronted by his plant clone. 

While much of the ecology the characters encounter is incredibly dangerous in horrifying and elaborate ways, the show makes explicit that not all flora and fauna pose a direct threat. Some instances depict the environment as wondrous and even beneficial to the characters’ survival. In one scene, a character suffering from a skin disease seeks respite in a pool of water. Suddenly, the viewer sees a pack of dark fish approach from the depths, and there’s an “oh shit” moment where you expect they may attack. But the tension is immediately resolved once the fish begin harmlessly nibbling at the infected flesh, assuaging the character’s ailment. 

This tension around what is and isn’t a threat is central to the flow of the narrative, which simply wouldn’t work if everything was overtly dangerous. The point is not that Vesta is dangerous but that it is alien—everything has its own logic, which can only be discovered through observation and experimentation. 

This experimentation and observation is the key to every character’s survival, which they go about in different ways: each must adapt to the environment by learning how they may integrate themselves into the ecosystem—figuratively for the most part, as most characters navigate various hazards, but literally in the case of one character who physically and mentally merges with a psychic predator, and also literally in the case of a robot who experiences a strange one-ness with the planet after mysterious golden mold integrates with their circuitry. Those that fail to adapt all perish.  

More importantly, this experimentation and observation in a survival context is key to making the world feel vivid and distinctive. If the alien world was a setting for a different sort of story to take place, say like Pandora in the first Avatar film, Vesta might be remembered only as a series of lush backdrops with maybe a familiar merchandise-friendly animal popping up here and there, as opposed to the layered, puzzle-box ecosystem it is given the space to be. The workings of the planet are not set dressing, they're the source of conflict and driver of change in the narrative.

Fantastic Planet

As mentioned above, immediately noticeable to anyone familiar with Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet, is their shared fixation on showing the natural workings of their respective alien ecologies. 

Fantastic Planet takes place on an alien world dominated by a race of giant blue humanoids called Draags. Human beings, brought from Earth some time in the indefinite past, are treated as animals and sometimes kept as pets. The story follows a human pet who escapes his home and joins a community of wild humans who eventually rise up against the Draags, voyage to the “fantastic planet” orbiting the Draag world, and win freedom for all mankind. 

Unlike the world of Scavengers Reign, with its sort of naturalistic indifference, the world of Fantastic Planet is overtly hostile. The sparse, brutal locales of the film’s setting are home to nightmarish flora and fauna, each designed to feel as cruel and inhospitable as possible. They clamp, whip, and slice senselessly as fragile humans scurry through the narrative. 

One scene that’s particularly illustrative of this hostility: the protagonist and another human are making their way through some tangled overgrowth. Looming above is some sort of plant or creature that looks like a pumpkin-shaped head sporting a long branching nose supported on several stalks within an organic cage. A bird creature flaps toward the head and lands on one of the nose-branches. The branches then close around the bird, shake it violently, and then toss it to the ground where the camera lingers on dozens of other bird corpses littered about. I clipped the scene and included it here because it's too good to describe with just words.

The lingering on the corpses subtly demonstrates that Fantastic Planet should be understood as a film about its setting, with the plot simply there to justify moving from one ecological scene to another. Whereas in Scavengers Reign human stories are told through how survivors interact with alien ecologies, the alien organisms and bizarre natural scenes cover far more of what Fantastic Planet is as a work of art than the plot or characters.

Fantastic Planet establishes itself as a survival story upon which such a distinctive, resonant setting through how it features humanity in relation to the environment. Human characters are depicted as tiny ants against harsh barren landscapes, fragile as paper dolls when they are pulled and plucked by curious Draags or hungry predators. This use of scale and severity highlights the hostility of the world, amplifying to a grotesque degree what is at bottom a very basic story about how humans use ingenuity to overcome our status as squishy subjects in a dangerous world. 

What else? (SURPRISE it's Hundreds of Beavers)

A third work, much different from the previous two, brings home the point. 

The 2022 slapstick comedy Hundreds of Beavers represents a third approach to worldbuilding through survival. The film follows Jean Kayak, an applejack brewer whose life is upended after beavers destroy his home and farm. Jean finds himself alone and naked in the wintry wilderness, where over the course of the film he develops the skills and wherewithal to become a legendary trapper.

The film differs from the previous two examples as Hundreds of Beavers take place not on an alien world but right here on Earth, though a black-and-white comedified version. The looney-tunes logic is essentially as novel to Jean as it is to the viewer, who despite inhabiting the setting prior to the events of the film still must learn the workings of the environment through observation and trial and error.  It is exactly this sort of logic that establishes the character of the setting, and that Jean exploits to go from incompetent to a master of his world.

Much of the film's comedy and worldbuilding comes from introducing a phenomenon, such as a bird that attacks Jean early in the movie, prompted by him whistling when a nest full of eggs is within reach; reintroducing the phenomenon in a new context, such as when Jean, later in the film, is attacked by the bird who appears from seemingly nowhere when he makes the same whistle in an unrelated circumstance; and then reinterpreting the phenomenon into an exploitable facet of the world, such as when Jean, late in the movie, puts his distinctive hat on an unsuspecting target and then issues the now-familiar whistle, summoning the bird to attack the disguised victim. The bird example is only one instance of many of these phenomena constantly being iterated upon and intersecting in novel ways. 

Though Hundreds of Beavers has different aims as a work of art and as a speculative setting than Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet, the ecology is foregrounded in the same way. The work is not as focused on the environment as such, rather on the comical interactions between Jean and the wilderness’s inhabitants, but the way these interactions are mediated is through a similarly “alien” set of rules and sideways rationalities. In this way, Hundreds of Beavers shares a common thread with Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet in how they both focus on people reduced to a primitive state, Scavengers Reign in particular how survival is secured through observation and experimentation with the local ecology and Fantastic Planet with protagonists’ drive to transcend through knowledge their circumstances as subject to the whims of a world they are not suited for. 

Putting this to use

These three survival stories tells us what any OSR person already knows, which is that it is the constraints inherent to an environment that makes the environment feel vivid. For dungeons we already have darkness, traps, stuck doors, and the like, but for some reason it has been much more difficult to apply these same principles to overworked exploration. 

The closest I've seen anyone come to this is Ms. Screwhead with the excellent laws of the land. 

By putting difficulty first, we establish impediments to survival which in turn help players build meaningful relationships with the setting. 

A good rule of thumb for challenging regions is that they should have clear answers to about two or three of these questions. Any more and the area risks becoming prohibitively difficult (which is not always a problem but something to keep in mind).

1. Why is resting is difficult?
2. Why is finding food is difficult?
3. Why is travel difficult?
4. Why is not getting lost is difficult?
5. Why is fighting difficult?
6. Why transporting cumbersome goods or treasure is difficult?

Instead of trying to invent a new system to generate survival ecosystems, I'll lay out a pair of lists of biotic and abiotic factors in an ecosystem with baked-in difficulty. Consider these as levers to pull to answer the above questions. 

Biotic factors

1. Large territorial predators
2. Coordinated pack hunters
3. Camouflage or mimicking predators
4. Mesopredators or prey with deterring, fear-inducing, or hypnotic self-defense mechanisms
5. Habitat-modifying (i.e. burrowing, dam-building, etc.) creatures
6. Behavior-altering parasites or pathogen vectors
7. Swarming insects
8. Plants with harmful self-defense mechanisms
9. Carnivorous or trapping plants
10. Highly active decomposers

Abiotic factors (you probably want no more than two of these per region)

1. Extreme temperature (intense heat or cold, sudden swings, microclimate pockets)
2. Extreme wind (gales, tornadoes, downbursts) 
3. High water variability (drought, flash floods, ephemeral rivers)
4. High terrain instability (tremors, rockslides, fissures)
5. Toxic or corroding chemicals (hazardous soil minerals, acid pools)
6. Combustion (wild fires, flammable peat)
7. Low visibility (haze, fog)
8. High verticality (cliffs, overhangs, ravines, sinkholes)
9. Anomalous weather (icicle-knife hail, magnet storms, rain of frogs)
10. Harmful air (poison smog, spores)

As a fun exercise, you can quickly hack together a rudimentary system of ecological relationships by explaining adaptations the biotic factors have as a response to each other and the abiotic factor. Perhaps in the future I'll make this a more robust and usable tool.

Here's an example: 

I rolled 9 and 2 for biotic factors and 8 for an abiotic factor: 

• Carnivorous plant
• Pack hunter
• High verticality

Specific adaptation the carnivorous plant has to living in a region with high verticality: 

Long, corded tendrils that dangle over ledges, contract when agitated. Unsuspecting creatures are constricted and slowly pulled up to the plant to be consumed for nutrients. 

Specific adaptation the coordinated pack hunter has to surviving in spite of the carnivorous plant:

Bipedal hunting lizards with two edged spines protruding scissor-like from their tails. Use their spines to shear through the tendrils otherwise too thick to claw or chew apart. 

You can layer in more biotic and abiotic factors as you please. 

State of the TRAIPSE 2026

 Join me, dear reader, as I indulge in some self-reflection...

2025 Retrospective

This past year was a quite a solid one for my home game. We completed our 24th session after about a year and a half of playing. My players, all people who entirely new to D&D, have taken to the game swimmingly, graduating from groping about in the dungeon to groping about in the overworld. Standout sessions from 2025 include an impeccable raid on an Owlbear lair where for maybe once ever everything went exactly to the players' plans, a mass combat battle against a hobgoblin warband involving me finally getting to use a table-sized whiteboard I found in an alley, and a high-stakes stealth mission in a pig man fortress which culminated in hijacking an alchemically powered battle wagon right from under their snouts.

The PCs went from nervous pushovers to fantasy JSOC guys, in the sense that when they're not performing highly tactical and morally dubious infiltration missions they're partying recklessly, fencing stolen goods, and generally being a menace to the local townspeople who nonetheless have to tolerate them (I've been reading Seth Harp's The Fort Bragg Cartel recently; highly recommend to see what is essentially murderhoboism applied in the real world and all its horrifying consequences). 

As for the blog, I've continued my cozy rough-monthly posting scheduling and felt great doing it. This past year's hottest post was The 10 types of special rooms, which a decent number of people found useful.  

The current blogging meta seems to be tools and resources for prep, as opposed to houses rules and setting posts, which seemed way more common when I was first getting into the OSR. Something to consider for those of you who want to raise your blogging game. 

On to 2026

This year I want to up the posting cadence a bit. 

When this blog first started, it was during a time when there was a dramatic drop in the kinds of posts I enjoyed reading throughout the OSR sphere. This was due to a number of factors (notable controversies, end of G+, etc.) but in my mind can mostly be chalked up to the '10s era of the OSR drawing to a close with no real direction for what comes next. 

I started posting as a little side hobby to get my disparate ideas about the game into a more polished and shareable form. As such, I didn't have much aspiration to participate in what I understood as the larger "scene," which was really a bunch of siloed communities scrambling to define and defend ingroup identity. 

Now it's fair to say a new iteration of the OSR is in swing. There is a wide variety of people doing a wide variety of cool and interesting things. Posting's BACK. 

I feel like I have more to contribute in this new era, so I intend to be more active. 

On that note, I started a Bluesky! Follow me there. It's not a perfect platform but in my mind it's a nice medium to have more back-and-forth conversations with people without being as cloistered as forums or as fleeting as Discord. 

That's all for now. See you in the future. 

Headband of the Phrontisery

A magic item inspired by Josh's version of Phlox's version of the Periapt of Wisdom.

The idea is to take a traditional passive stat-boost item and turn it into something active. I'm game. 

Here's my take on the classic Headband of Intellect. 

The Headband of Intellect is a band of rich cloth embroidered with a swirling pattern of violet, green, and blue. The inner lining has a pair curious golden eyes stitched into the fabric. 

Wearing the headband provides no benefit, but pull it over your eyes and you find yourself in a cavernous hall filled with books. Thick volumes brim from lofty shelves, piles of manuscripts cramp the corridors, boxes of scrolls and vellums litter the floor. You are greeted by a crow with golden eyes who introduces himself as Meero. 

Within the library you can find the answer to virtually any question on an academic subject (such as history, theology, biology, and whatever else is in the sage specialization list from the AD&D DMG). But it takes time to sort through all the clutter. 

General questions take 2d6 minutes to answer, specific questions 2d6 turns, and exacting questions 2d6 hours. The DM determines whether a question is general, specific, or exacting before you roll. Rolling doubles increases the time increment—general questions take turns, specific questions take hours, and exacting questions cannot be answered. 

Meero offers to aid your research. He'll remove any dice of your choosing to shorten research time and undo the effect of doubles. He can take more than one dice; if he takes them all he just tells you the answer outright. 

His help comes at a cost: for every six dice Meero removes, the library gets more disordered. Shelves collapse, piles grow, and the text themselves get more circuitous and nonsensical. Add an additional d6 to research time rolls. 

Rolling triples exposes you to a cognitohazard. Unless Meero removes dice, you lose 3% of the experience earned since leveling up as your grasp of reality slips away. But your brush with forbidden knowledge gives you +1 Intelligence while wearing the band, max +3. 

Other details:

• While your mind occupies the library demiplane, your body remains in the material world in deep meditation. In the library you can hear others vaguely if they're shouting but otherwise are oblivious to your real-world surroundings.  
• Removing the headband or having it pulled off negates any progress you made so far. 
• You don't bring anything with you into the library. Even though it feels like you're physically there, it's all just in your mind.

Once the research roll would raise above 6d6, the library becomes too disheveled to use. Meero loses any interest in speaking with you and instead attempts to pick out your eyes should you visit again. 

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If anyone wishes to join in on this, the Gauntlets of Ogre Power, Gloves of Dexterity, Cloak of Charisma, and Amulet of Health are up for grabs. Claim one if you dare!

Lords of Nevelorn

Recently, my players have turned their attention away from the dungeon and began exploring a bit of the overworld. They opted to embark on a few rather self-contained adventures these past few sessions, but it's beginning to be time for me to actually get my act together and start filling out the hex map. I'm preparing my body and mind by pouring over the amazing work Idraluna Archives and the Blog of Forlorn Encystement have done with their own recent hex mapping endeavors, picking through the original Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and attempting to subliminally imprint the entirety of Tales of the Dying Earth into my brain. 

I've always been captivated by OD&D's castle generation rules, so I started with Nevelorn's strongholds. The goal is to get enough detail down that I know the general "shape" of each NPC and their stronghold and can fill in more details later or improvise on the fly should the need arise. 

For convenience's sake, every NPC here is 9th-level

The King of Axes (Neutral Fighter). Ross Mandale, a legendary veteran of the Seven Wars, resides in a low hill fortress overlooking a village of 650 residents, mostly retired mercenaries and their families. He is the chosen bearer of the Master Axe, discovered only after being on the receiving end of a blow from an unworthy wielder. The axe head remains lodged between his eyes to this day, and while it’s there no axe deigns to do him harm. The Dead Company, a band of 8 daredevil myrmidons, defend the castle along with 140 men-at-arms. 

The Barbarian Queen (Neutral Fighter). Nara Skybreaker dwells in a keep surrounded by a village of 160 barbarians. She seeks to unite the clans of the barbarian hinterlands. Her friend and protector is a dire panther which she rides into battle. Her lands are protected by 90 berserkers. She is served by 6 heroes who ride upon giant tuatara lizards, each the eldest son of a barbarian chief she bested in combat. 

The Violet Lord (Lawful Fighter). Dragomir Ulrum claims descent from the lost kings of Nevelorn, and dwells in an old sprawling stone castle guarded by 110 men-at-arms overlooking a town of 930 residents. His domain is protected by the Violet Knights, a fraternity of 4 solemn Champions riding juvenile rocs with striking lavender plumage. A spectre haunts the castle, the manifestation of an ancestral curse plaguing the Ulrum bloodline for generations. 

The Lord of Banes (Chaotic Fighter). Siegbrand von Skor lives in a menacing fortress encircled by a moat of tar. He commands a force of 160 bloodthirsty brigands who terrorize the surrounding locale. Skor despises weakness and deems anyone incapable of protecting themselves worthy only of death or subjugation. He is aided by a vicar of Rintrah who consorts with a pack of seven fearsomely mutated lycanthropes that stalk the forested lands around the fortress. 

The Lady the Engine (Lawful Fighter). Lady Amberine resides in tall walled palace constructed as the topmost section of an ancient buried megastructure. Surrounding the palace is a tranquil village of  640 residents who are kind yet distrustful of outsiders. Lady Amberine wishes to avoid the conflicts of Nevelorn and prevent anything from entering her domain which may disrupt the peace. In addition to 130 brightly uniformed men-at-arms, her land is protected by the 10 Men of the Engine, living statues salvaged from deep within the megastructure. They are constructed a peculiar metal-ceramic alloy and can shoot jets of blue flame from their fingertips.

The First Inevitable (Lawful Cleric). Resides in the The Basilica Aeterna, the clockwork bastion of the Aeternum. Locked within the basilica are dozens of magic items horded by the Aeternum deemed too dangerous to be used. Though petrified, the High Inevitable can still move and speak, and has rumored to be over 1000 years old. The bastion is protected by 120 silent men-at-arms and 6 towering siege golems decorated with the faces of saints. 

The High Adjudicator (Lawful Cleric). Lives in the Holy Fortress, a fortified cathedral defended by 100 templars. He leads the Justiciars, an order of 10 heroes riding hippogriffs who enforce order throughout the land. The High Adjudicator militantly enforces the strictures of Law, taking an uncompromising approach to bringing outlaws and heretics to justice. 

The Red-Eyed Deceiver (Chaotic Cleric). Dwells in the Burning Tower, a wide column of ruddy stone. Red light pours from each window and smoke billows from its peak as 220 masked prisoners toil endlessly in the furnace-lit chambers toward inscrutable ends. They are guarded by a group of 80 fanatical warriors who worship The Deceiver as a prophet. Her lover is a demoniac wyvern whose scales she replaced with plates of fell iron. 

She of Limpid Mercy (Lawful Cleric). Oversees The Hall of Contrition, a wide castle of white stone where the mutated, diseased, and corrupted faithful find refuge. There are 700 such afflicted living in the village outside the hall, which is protected by 130 men-at-arms covered in white bandages. Guarding the domain are five hulking flesh golems each composed of hundreds of sinews braided in a sacred pattern, each originating from a deceased afflicted who wished to continue to serve She of Limpid Mercy and the Church beyond their death. Rumors of heresy draw unwanted attention from the Aeternum. 

Vyla The Necrope (Chaotic Magic-User). Dwells in a many-spired castle of darksome green. There, she practices foul arts to learn the secrets of life and death. She demands a nearby village of 450 weary residents give her their deceased in exchange for her protection. She has risen an army of 150 skeletons, and has pulled 11 grotesqueries, gargoyles with muscular human bodies and monstrous faces, from abyssal Sheol to do her bidding. She seeks the formula of the potion of longevity, wishing to live forever.  

The Lady of Rain (Neutral Magic-User). Her domain is hidden within a ring of terrible storms, but through the torrential downpour is an idyllic grove washed in light rain where her gleaming citadel stands beneath a perpetual rainbow. Nymphs, driads, and wildlife of all sort play and frolic in the fields. The Lady has bound an elemental of air and one of water to her service through the use of a Censor and a Bowl of Elemental Control. She seeks the Brazier and Stone to complete her collection. A force of 90 men-at-arms patrol her lands, composed mostly lost travelers allowed to live on the edge of her domain in exchange for their service. Those who are slack in their duty or disrupt the grove's tranquility are remediated through the use of a Charm spell. 

Nimbril Longfinger (Neutral Magic-User). Lives in a narrow tower of cyclopean brick. Nimbril's inquisitive nature has led him to pursue the synthesis of life. From his vats he has produced all manner of piteous short-lived things. His greatest success was a pair of monstrous chimera, who nearly destroyed his tower upon first waking. Through guile and persuasion he trapped them in cages of bronze and hung them from the long balconies of his tower, where they may be unleashed upon intruders. The chimeras are kept sedate, lazily scheming how they may get revenge upon their creator. In low hovels at the foot of his tower are 100 tottering homunculi who fight as standard men-at-arms. They expire at just the rate he manages to replace them. Nimbril seeks a spell to carry him to the world of Carcosa, which is said to contain the secret of synthetic life. 

Skalder the Cold (Neutral Magic-User). Resides in a hollow statue carved into a mountain face. Defending his stronghold are 80 berserkers from the barbarian hinterlands. Skalder has learned many secrets of the Seething Mountains from the they frost giants who live nearby, who may be called upon for aid in times of need. 

Kalindho of Caztaan (Chaotic Magic-User). Dwells in a low manse at the edge of the Many-Colored Moor. A band of 60 gnolls protects Kalindho's manse in exchange for a recreative narcotic of his own devising. He keeps a demon (10 HD) bound in a domed cupula which changes position upon the manse at odd times. The demon will fight defend Kalindho's manse and advises the wizard, but he secretly guides his master down a path of elaborate ruin. Kalindho currently wishes, either by force or subterfuge, to gain access to the great engine beneath Lady Amberine's palace. It is said Kalindho provides travelers the means of safe passage through the Many-Colored Moor, but he demands a heavy price. 

The Aeternum

I've written before about how Chaos are the bad guys. That doesn't mean Law can't be the bad guys either. 

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The Aeternum is a radical sect of the Church of Law rapidly gaining prominence in the wake of the Seven War period. They preach the doctrine of stasis: let nothing change. Without the possibility of change, there is nothing to dispute the ineffable and unyielding truth of Law. All things which seek to challenge Law will yield to its inexorable plan.

Ask a member of the Church and they'd say the Aeternum of course do not actually wish to freeze the world in its current state, but rather achieve, or perhaps usher in, some sort of figurative spiritual revolution, and this member, depending on their disposition, will be sure to tell you that while they don't condone the manner in which the Aeternum go about their practice, they're dedication is commendable.

Ask a member of the Aeternum and they would say there is nothing figurative about their plans—the world of men can only serve the Lords of Law in a state of perfect, eternal stillness. For are not the Lords themselves unchanging? Are our notions of order and reason not but the earthly emanations of their transcendent, perpetual forms?

Philip Jackson

Naturally, the Aeternum aren’t too keen on adventures awakening slumbering horrors and recovering reality-altering artifacts from ages past.

How are they antagonizing the PCs today?

1. Sealing the dungeon's entrance
2. Quarantining the base town for a reported chaos incursion
3. Mandating they surrender their magic items. "Scoundrels like you can't be trusted with them!" 
4. Attempting to press them into service hunting heretics. Refusal is considered proof the party is in league with Chaos.
5. Capturing peasants and forcing them to convert or be put to death
6. Burning a giant symbol of stasis in the middle of the city. Significant property damage deemed a worthy tradeoff for nebulous long-term goals. 

Aeternum

HD: 1 AC: 5 Attacks: 1 x mace (1d6) Move: 90'(30') Saves: as Cleric 1 Morale: 10 Alignment: Lawful Number appearing: 2d8+2 (war band) / 1d6x10 (caravan transporting artifacts/prisoners/treasure) / 2d20 accompanying 1d10x10 0 HD followers (pilgrimage to holy site) 

War bands are led by a 4 HD Perpetuant. Caravans and pilgrimages include 1 Perpetuant per 10 Aeternum and are led by a 6 HD Permanence. 

AETERNAL POWERS (Treat these as level-less spells, usable by members of the Aeternum once per day for every 2 HD they possess.) 

1. Edict. Issue a simple command a number of creatures up to the Aeternum's HD must save vs. spells or be compelled to obey.
2. Eternity's Grasp. Holds (as the spell) a number of creatures equal to the Aeternum's HD. Lasts until the Aeternum moves or is moved. 
3. Suspension field. Freeze missiles in the air. Protects a number of creatures up to the Aeternum's HD.
4. Preserve. A single object is safe from all forms of rot and decay for a number of months equal to the Aeternum's HD. 
5. Reversion. The effect of a number of rounds equal to the Aeternum's HD are undone. Only targets the caster, so they recover any hp lost and consumables spent but everything else remains the same.  
6. Static zone. Everything within a radius equal to the Aeternum's HD x10' is under the effect of a Slow and Silence spell. Lasts until the Aeternum moves or breaks full concentration. If 10 or more HD of Aeterna are participating, the area of effect is measured by only the highest-HD Aeternum and also negates magic. 
7. Contrition. Creature suffering from a curse, disease, or mutation takes 2d8 damage and is freed from its affliction (if the creature has multiple curses, diseases, etc. only one is removed). Unwilling creatures may save vs. spells to resist the effect, with a penalty equal to half the Aeternum's HD rounding down. 
8. Negentropy. Counter another spell cast this round. If the spell countered is level 4 or greater, the caster gets a save vs. spells to resist. 
9. Eternalize. Flesh to Stone or Stone to Flesh. Unwilling targets who fail their save are affected for 2d6 rounds, but the effect is permanent if cast by an Aeternum with 8+ HD. Members of the Aeternum regularly use these abilities on themselves and others as part of their many esoteric ritual practices. 
10. Inexorable Gaze. Detect Magic, Detect Evil, and Know Alignment wrapped into one. Targets a radius equal to the Aeternum's HD x10'. Lasts for one round. 

kzlkid

Treasure

1. Marble halo. A ring of marble that, when worn over the head, turns the wearer to stone until the halo is removed.
2. Immovable rod. 
3. Crosier of Cancelation. Touch a magic item and expend a charge to fully disenchant it. The Crosier has 1d6+2 charges. Effect last for 2d6 days.   
4. Eternity egg. An egg big enough to fit a human child made of perfectly smooth white stone, kept in an ornate cage of gold and pearl. Feels hollow and incredibly cold to the touch. The egg slows time in the local area, approximately one one-hundredth of a second per second, compounding imperceptibly with each passing moment. The oldest known egg is located in a special chamber within the Basilica Aeterna, which makes time flow at half the speed in a three-mile radius from the megastructure. Of course, the difference is imperceptible to those within the radius.  
5. Trapped lightning. Stored in a quartz cylinder. Releasing it deals 5d6 damage to everything in a straight line, save vs. breath for half. 
6. Tincture of Sustention. Prevents aging and level drain for 10 years. '
7. Negation Hammer. Warhammer +1, struck creatures must save vs. wands or lose the ability to cast spells for the next hour. 

The 10 types of special rooms

"A Special is anything not exactly a trap, but placed for special reasons." Moldvay Basic pg. B52

Traps, monsters, secret doors, and treasure all cohere into continuous flows of challenge/reward and mystery/discovery. Special rooms, on the other hand, largely stand apart from these conventional elements while also replicating them in miniature: drinking from the magic fountain might raise an ability score but it might also make you vomit bees. The one-way elevator to the sixth floor might be a death sentence for low-level parties but incredibly valuable for experienced adventurers. 

The purpose of this exercise is to categorize common forms of special rooms found in old school-style dungeons. 

While the point of special rooms is to have bizarre, unique dungeon set pieces that defy expectation, having a list of common forms might help DMs come up with new ideas, or new ways to approach conventional ones. 

A trio of caveats: 

1. This is not intended to categorize the specific contents of special rooms (fountains, statues, etc.), but rather different meta-categories of special room.
2. Special rooms may have two or more categories layered atop one another; i.e. the reward of a puzzle room may be transit to another part of a dungeon.
3. These categories are not exclusive to special rooms—monster lairs, traps, and other kinds of rooms can also incorporate elements from this list. 

Anyway there are 10 types of special rooms

1. Random Effect
2. Experiment
3. Alter Environment
4. Exchange
5. Side Quest
6. Puzzle 
7. Minigame
8. Transit
9. Trick
10. Curiosity

Random Effect 

• The room with the magic pools from In Search of the Unknown. 
• The room with the magic stone, also from In Search of the Unknown.
• A white tree bearing opalescent berries; eating one imparts a random boon or bane
• A strange monolith covered in glowing runes of various sizes and colors. Each one does something different when touched. 

Random effect rooms offer players an opportunity to interact with something and roll on a table to see what happens. Alternate version is when there are multiple things to interact with and each one has its own effect. In both cases, the effects are unknown to the players and the general assumption is they are figuratively rolling the dice to see what happens. This is the OSR DM’s fast ball. The most fundamental special room, and the perfect crystal distillation of the OSR “play to find out” ethos. All you need is a random list of oddball effects and distinctive set dressing to frame it and you’re all but guaranteed a memorable table experience. 

Not every kind of dungeon needs a room like this, but every dungeon has space for one. However, much like the fastball, it can get stale if you use it too frequently. I like having these on an early dungeon level, since low-level characters are easier for players to gamble with.

Experiment

• A solar laser trained on a stone plinth; pulling a chain activates the laser, cutting anything on the plinth in half. 
• A machine that spits out two shoddy copies of whatever is thrown in its hopper. 
• Jeff Rients's classic tiny door. 
• Anyone who passes under the gaze of the Mercury Idol turns to mist for the next 1d6 turns (as Gaseous Form). Nonliving material like equipment and armor are unaffected. 
• A pedestal polymorphs anything placed upon it into a beautiful vase. If removed, the vase reverts to its original form after a day or if it shatters. The vase currently atop the pedestal is a polymorphed green slime. 

Experiment rooms offer a feature of open-ended utility to mess around with. You are probably familiar with them from the Dungeon Checklist. 

Experiments simultaneously resist understanding yet invite interaction, putting them in the sweet spot of good dungeon set pieces. The act of engaging with one is itself rewarding, because once the players learn the rules of an experiment they get to exploit it. The risk is lost goods, unwanted mutilation, and the like, while the reward is a new way for the players to use the dungeon to their advantage. 

Experiments operate on two axes of challenge: the challenge of figuring out how to properly interact and the challenge of figuring out how to exploit. Most good experiments only have challenge along one of these axes—in other words, something that is difficult to figure out how to operate should have a pretty good payoff (the splicing vats from Gardens of Ynn are a good example: there’s a complicated multi-step process you essentially have to trial-and-error, but getting them to work can lead to some pretty major benefits with no downside), whereas something that has an open-ended but not immediately beneficial utility should be rather straightforward to operate. 

Alter Environment

• A valve that raises or lowers the water level throughout the dungeon. 
• Flipping the switch to the blue side opens all the blue doors and locks all the red, flipping it to the red side does the reverse. 
• Removing the skull from the center of the pentagram banishes the warding seals and spirit guardians but awakens the Hungering Darkness. 

Alter environment rooms offer means to change how the dungeon is navigated. This can mean any alteration to layout, doors, hazards, and so on. 

It is widely understood that good dungeon design involves both rooms where interacting with something in one influences something in another and that player actions can have an influence on the shape of the dungeon. Alter Environment rooms accomplish both of these imperatives.

The more area of the dungeon affected by an alter environment room, the more it becomes a central gimmick. If it's just a one-off thing where the lever in room x raises the gate in room y you're not communicating much of a theme, but if the players must repeatedly jump through the magic mirror to solve puzzles in the mirror-dimension version of the dungeon then it becomes a mirror-dimension dungeon in addition to whatever else you have going on. Good to keep that in mind. 

Exchange

• Pour a potion in the Purple Witch's cauldron and she'll ladle you a vialful of her brew, which has the effect of a random other potion.
• A giant copper-shelled snail eats copper pieces and excretes gemstones of comparable value.

Exchange rooms offer an opportunity for players to change their equipment, gear, or treasure in unique ways. 

Exchange rooms are particularly effective if you frequently use randomly generated treasure hordes, as they give the players an opportunity to offset the quirks of the dice in the event they end up with six scrolls of protection from lycanthropes or whatever. They also expand the toolset available to the players in dungeons, allowing for a selectively reliable way to trade unwanted inventory for something more useful providing new access to goods or services.

Side Quest

• A statue comes to life when it's missing hand, found elsewhere in the dungeon, is restored. 
• A vault's crystal door only opens once all the crystal braziers scattered throughout the dungeon level are lit. 

Side Quests offer a new goal in the dungeon and gives players players can pursue in addition to conventional dungeoneering activities.

Side quests work because they provide a little spice to dungeon exploration, giving a players a new avenue for progression. They also bring that much-coveted interconnectivity because, as you can guess, the object of the side quest must involve at least one other room.

Puzzle

• Giant statue of a long-dead emperor looking menacing; on the statue's plinth an inscription reads "Salvation through submission." Doors lock, poison gas fills the room, in a low hidden niche in the plinth—clearly visible to anyone kneeling before the statue—is a small switch that deactivates the locks and gas.
• A room full of mirrors; one mirror reflects a door on the opposite wall that's not actually there. The mirror that reflects the door has a secret passage behind it. 
• Anything involving a riddle.

Puzzles offer an in-game scenario that directly challenges the players’ ingenuity (or ingénue-ity, but I have less experience with that). 

It should go without saying that everything in a dungeon can be a puzzle, like combat, traps, navigational hazards and so on, so special rooms are no exception. 

Puzzles can be contained within a single room, but they don’t have to be--a common tip for designing puzzles is to seed clues in other parts of the dungeon to promote interconnectivity. 

“But if a puzzle has clues seeded around the dungeon, what distinguishes it from a side quest?” the hypothetical gun aimed at my head says. “What’s the difference between moving room to room to collect macguffins vs. moving room to room to collect clues?”

 

The main difference is: Puzzles are about thinking and Side Quests are about doing. Imagine a treasure vault guarded by a demon who will only let the party through if they utter a specific passphrase. In a scenario where each word in the passphrase is found within a different room, and the sequence is rather easy to intuit, this challenge is a side quest—it’s pretty easy to figure out what the problem is and the challenge becomes finding each word. But in a scenario where the passphrase is the solution to a riddle, or encoded in a mural elsewhere on the level, you’ve got yourself a puzzle. Admittedly there can be a lot of overlap between the two, but my rule of thumb is: the more demanding a side-quest element is, the less demanding the figuring-out parts should be. And vice versa. 

Minigame

• A pack of goblins invite you to race alchemically powered junk-karts. 
• The mind-cube imprisons you in a mental maze, resolved by solving an actual pen-and-paper maze. 

Minigames offer an in-game scenario resolved through novel game systems. 

Minigames make for good diversions and give players a break from the main game. I ran a session recently where the party got access to an exclusive gambling hall. We spent most of the evening playing through the dice games in Appendix F of the AD&D DMG. It was a lot of fun, but not the kind of thing anyone wants to do every session. 

Transit

• Room drops off to a massive void; lighting the candle on a nearby plinth attracts giant floating jellyfish that bring anyone who grabs ahold a harmless tentacle to a deeper dungeon level. 
• Two identical circular chambers, each with a lever on the floor and a single door, north end for one and south for the other; stepping in one chamber and pulling the lever appears to rotate the room, door and all, 180°, transferring everyone to the other chamber elsewhere in the dungeon.

Transit rooms offer novel means to navigate elsewhere in the dungeon beyond your typical hallway or staircase.

Transit rooms allows for alternate routes for navigating a dungeon, can help parties save time and cut down on backtracking on repeat dungeon ventures, and can serve as navigational challenges. 

Trick

• Illusory stairs conceal a spiked pit. 
• A statue of a stern-looking angel. Anyone that approaches within a few inches must save vs. paralysis or be grabbed and restrained by the statue, which proceeds to release a blaring alarm.
• A room lined with racks and racks of ornate swords; removing one causes the swords to animate and attack.

Trick rooms offer a nonstandard challenge or hazard. 

Tricks feel very old-school in the sense that many of the ones you see in classic modules feel deliberately designed to mess with the players in a kind of funhousy meta-gaming-from-the-DM-side way. That flavor of adversarial DMing has fallen by the wayside these days, as well as funhouse dungeons in general, but a thoughtful trick here or there can create a memorable moment and convey the more malevolent aspects of the mythic underworld. A hallmark of a certain kind of old-school mindset is that having horrible things happen to your character can be as fun and engaging as having them succeed. 

Curiosity

• Room echoes with the voices of everyone ever slain in the dungeon. 
• An idiosyncratically cozy and well-appointed study, totally unlike the rest of the dungeon, complete with wizened sage reading & smoking a pipe in front of a warm hearth, somehow unmindful of the fact he's in the middle of a giant dungeon. 

Curiosity rooms offer a unique and distinctive location that lends to the dungeon’s mystery/majesty/dread.

Dungeons should have a healthy amount of idiosyncratic areas interspersed among standard rooms and corridors filled with traps, monsters, and treasure. Sometimes, these idiosyncratic locations may not have a clear utility, challenge, or problem to solve. Curiosity rooms are less focused on the objects within than the locale itself; while they be focused around a distinctive set piece, like a unique NPC, the primary effect of a curiosity room is atmospheric.   

Art by Pedro Friedeberg