My Underdark Campaign

The first time I ever seriously took on the role of DM was during my freshman year of college. I had somehow met a few gamers who were in their late 30s, and along with another friend convinced them to let me run my friend's spiffy new Night Below: An Underdark Campaign boxed set, an adventure designed to take several characters from first level to level ten or beyond. In other words, Night Below was a massive undertaking for a novice DM, but something that I have fond memories of running.

I really miss the massive campaign boxed sets that TSR used to put out--they came loaded with all kinds of cool stuff like massive maps, player hand-outs, random chits and tokens, and so forth. Seeing what was in the box was half the fun of buying it, and it led me to pick up the Waterdeep boxed set, Elminster's Ecology (disappointing in comparison), and maybe one or two others.

As you might gather from its name, the campaign is massive in the "vertical" sense of having players go deeper and deeper in the Underdark--it takes up very little space on the "surface", requiring little more than a couple of new villages. I decided to set the game in the Forgotten Realms, within travelling distance to Waterdeep so the PCs could have a large city to resupply in and adventure in if they got tired of being underground all the time. I'm not sure why I chose the Forgotten Realms; I think it might have been because I was minimally familiar with parts of it through the AD&D Goldbox computer games like Pools of Radiance. I liked the setting well enough, especially when I found one of the supplements that detailed all the little cities and keeps on the map--I felt like the adventurers could choose to go pretty much anywhere and I would have something cool to work with when they got there.

[The first scan is the surface map I used; basically, a tracing of that area of the Forgotten Realms on grid paper so I could easily calculate movement, along with locations needed for the campaign: the villages Milborne and Thurmaster, and the Garlstone Mines. Having everything done in my own writing was laborious, but it had the nice unintended side-effect of concealing from the players which locations were "background" and which were part of the campaign.]

Throughout the campaign, I had three core PCs and a handful of characters that came and went. If I remember correctly, the game was designed for something like 6-8 PCs, a number that always seemed ridiculously difficult to assemble on a regular basis. (reading http://grognardia.blogspot.com/ recently, it seems one of the major differences between old school and later players was the expectation of how many PCs would actually participate). Anyway, although there were only three PCs, I made the (perhaps crazy) decision not to scale back the encounter difficulty in any degree. My reasoning was that with fewer PCs, there would be more experience points and magical items per character, and thus they would level up and be more powerful than expected. Crazy or not, it seemed to work well enough for the game.

The three main PCs were:

(1) a barbarian from the Ten Towns in the Frozen North named Yarrrgh; mechanically, he was a standard Fighter, until we got the Complete Fighter's Handbook and had him take the Barbarian kit (which actually made him somewhat weaker, much to the player's dismay). Yarrrgh's player was canny and experienced at dungeon-delving, so he made a good leader.

(2) a Mystic speciality priest of the moon goddess Selune, named (*groan*) Crescentia. When I say "speciality priest" you might think a standard AD&D mace-wielding, chainmail-wearing cleric with a couple of abilities tinkered with; the Mystic class from the back of Faiths & Avatars was a real reimagining of the idea of the Cleric, however. Mystics were more like wise women in The Wheel of Time than battling holy warriors; they specialized in brewing esoteric potions that took days or even weeks to complete, had a more limited spell list, and very little combat ability or options when it came to weapons and armor. The idea of a Mystic class could have been interesting in certain campaigns, where subtlety and diplomacy were at the fore, especially in the hands of an experienced player. However, it was (in retrospect) a terrible idea for the Night Below campaign, especially because the person playing this unusual and complex character was simply one of those people who, no matter how long they've been playing, can't really understand the mechanics of the game in a way sufficient to use their character's tools to the fullest. In practice, this often meant the player of the barbarian (who was the Mystic's husband) telling her what spells to cast, a practice I frowned upon when they were "in-character" but let slide during breaks. Still, we had some good role-playing opportunities when the character would return to Waterdeep, where there was a temple of Mystra. Also, I created a rival NPC party led by a speciality priestess of Shar, the goddess of the night (and Selune's rival in the Forgotten Realms cosmology).

(3) A specialist wizard named Elden who specialized in aggressive combat spells (I think they were called Invokers, IIRC) and who had the Militant kit from the Complete Wizard's Handbook which allowed him to fight with a sword. This was very much a munchkin-style combo, but characters with real firepower (literally, in this case) were needed to get through the numerous monsters in the Underdark. About halfway through the campaign, Elden was killed in combat. The player promptly rolled up a new character named Jacob who was a specialist wizard who specialized in aggressive combat spells and who had the Militant kit). Nowadays, I would put the kibosh on someone making a new character just like their previous one, but the player assured me the new character would have a different personality and I naievely believed him.

The concept of the Night Below campaign, from what I remember, is that the PCs learn of several kidnappings in the area and eventually track the kidnappings to slavers in the Garlstone Mines; the mines, however, lead further and further into the Underdark, through several "communities" of monstrous races, until after having delved several miles, the tunnels reach The Sunless Sea, a massive city populated by gigantic aboleths, which are (in Wikipedia's words) "malevolent, eel-like aberrations with potent psionic abilities". The aboleths have some sort of doomsday plan that threatens the surface world, but that didn't end up being a main aspect of the campaign I ran.

One of the things I realized before I began directing is that the campaign designers seemed to assume that a few kidnapped strangers would be sufficient motivation for the PCs to repeatedly risk life and limb in the Underdark. This seemed a dubious proposition to me (and still does), so I came up with a different adventure hook. The campaign started with all of the PCs groggily waking up in the lair of a mad Island of Doctor Moreau type wizard, who had kidnapped and experimented on the PCs by injecting them with a terrible, but noncontagious, plague. The plague could not be removed by Cure Disease or other mundane means, and for every month that passed, the PCs suffered increasingly stiff mechanical penalties (barely noticeable at first, but growing serious as the months went on in-world). So after escaping the mad wizard's lair (which was a fun way to throw everyone together instead of the standard "you're all in the tavern" starter), the PCs have a reason to stick together: they have to find a cure for the disease they all share. After a couple of levels spent on the surface trying to track down clues, they learned that the only cure is the heart of a Grand Aboleth and thus get directed towards the area where the entrance to the Night Below is located. In a way this was railroading, but in a somewhat more subtle way--I never tried to "keep them on track", I let them fritter away as much time doing side quests and adventures as they wanted; they just realized from time to time that their characters were slowly, but inexorably, growing weaker (the disease advanced at a fixed, calculable rate) and that if they didn't take action they might miss out on the opportunity to cure themselves before they grew too weak to survive the Underdark. Because they were persistent and clever in exploring alternative ways to cure themselves, I let them find temporary means of halting or reversing the progression of the disease, enough to give them hope and an incentive to see things through. I don't know if I would do something so drastic were I running the campaign today, but it was an effective way to keep everyone together and motivated in reaching The Sunless Sea.

[The next scanned image is an example of the calendar I kept to keep track of how many in-game months passed; the PCs (who had given themselves the funny nickname "The Cure") began play on Tarsakh (April) 15th, 1370 and reached the end of the campaign on Nightal (December) 21, 1371--about a year and a half of in-game play]

Preparing for each session was more time-consuming than I expected since I assumed all the work was already done and in the campaign books. But it took a lot of time to translate what was on the page into a fashion where I could really use the information for a session--I filled a couple of thick notebooks with boiled-down room descriptions, key monster stats, logs of magic weapons and who had them, etc. As I still find in my Star Wars campaign, the trick is to accurately predict how far the PCs will get in any given session, and for the Night Below I was usually only a stretch of corridor or two ahead of where the PCs ended up on any particular night.

Mapping was a big part of the adventure, and necessitated an overall "strategic map" of the Underdark [the third scanned image] as well as more detailed individual maps. I only allowed the players to see what they actually explored, so their final map of the The Sunless Sea, for example, only depicts probably 1/7th of the city. The distances are so vast, it took about two weeks in-game to travel all the way from the entrance of the Underdark to its end--still, the PCs made the trip in and out fairly frequently, especially in the beginning. This was also in the days of random encounters (do they still do that with Third & Fourth Edition?), so for each chunk of movement the PCs could end up with additional combats.

I really liked how the campaign set up the ending--it wasn't just the PCs hacking through enough bad guys that they finally reached the Grand Aboleth and a big battle. Instead, the PCs had to bring about the collapse of The Sunless Sea through a variety of means that would result in their accumulating a certain number of points for each action (murdering one of the city's priests, desecrating a shrine, rescuing slaves, etc.); as these points reached certain levels, the city would react in ways only I knew (increasing security, sending out counter-attacks, etc.). This sort of system meant the PCs had to conduct several commando-style raids and strategically plan how they were going to undermine the city--being tough enough to survive a single combat was not enough, nor could the PCs have any hope of slaughtering each of the thousands of aboleths and their kuo-toa minions that resided in the city.

The big climactic battle against the Grand Aboleth was definitely rewarding. The Mystic died relatively quickly, leaving the barbarian--who possessed a powerful magical sword (one of the few things that could harm the monster)--and the militant wizard. After several rounds of terrible, city-shaking combat, the cavern began to collapse and the battle still raged on. Ultimately, Yarrrgh fell in battle, but Jacob picked up the magic blade and, with just a few hit points left, managed to finish off the hideous monster. I didn't have to fudge any dice for such an exciting outcome (I wouldn't have, anyway), and this was one of the things that confirmed my believe that randomness is consonant with exciting storytelling.

Post-Night Below (with the characters having reached around level 13), Jacob ended up working with the Zhentarim (an evil organization of sorcerors in the Realms) and Crescentia was resurrected (though secretly dominated by the evil priestess of Shar). I briefly directed Yarrrgh's solo descent into Undermountain, but that didn't really go anywhere before we moved on to other things. (the Undermountain adventure, which I would like to try again someday, comically began with Yarrrgh naked in a featurless cube-shaped room which contained a secret door that would only appear if the prisoner said something along the lines of "Exit" or "Let me Out"--the character spent 18 in-game days before figuring it out).

As I mentioned at the beginning, I have fond memories of the campaign and it was a good lesson in preparation and book-keeping. If circumstances ever permitted, I'd be very tempted to run another massive boxed campaign (I'm not even sure what's out there--I remember seeing the Rod of Seven Parts long ago) and recreate some of the memories with different characters and different adventures.