REVIEW: UK1 Beyond the Crystal Cave (video)

 

Preliminary Delineation of Adventure Types

As I prepare “How I Design” videos for different kinds of adventure, I am naturally brought to consider what types of adventure there are – because plainly different adventures have different formats and styles, and require different design decisions and different ways of running them. I’m going to offer a very tentative list of “adventure types” (and subtypes) here, in hopes it’s of use to, well, me, as well the community as a whole. Add other possibilities in the comments!
 
Fundamentally – given a basic assumption of D&D rules – I think there are three major categories of adventure. These are formally based on where they are located, though in fact their geography is only one part of their categorization, with the other being the format of their design, and the expectations on player decisions.
 
The Dungeon Adventure
The “Dungeon Adventure” is the adventure in a closed environment, with fixed and fully mappable geography, where the 10-minute Exploration Turn makes sense. The environment constrains player decision and focuses them on effective and intelligent exploration. This could be a 10-level megadungeon or a 19-room one-session wonder – size is not the determinant. Geography and format are.
 
The typical benefits of the Dungeon Adventure are the way in which the physical constraints allow the DM to create a textured and dense environment with relatively knowable routes of player action. For the player, it presents the ultimate challenge in environmental player skill – to map accurately, to predict patterns of traps, to solve puzzles, to pit physically close factions against each other, and the rest.
 
The Dungeon Adventure may occur in caverns or ruined castle dungeons, but it may also happen in any enclosed environment. A spaceship setting will often be a Dungeon Adventure (see S4 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits). A museum can be a Dungeon Adventure (see my How I Design A Dungeon video for my example of developing such a module). Even a “wilderness” setting can be a Dungeon Adventure, if set on a small enough groundscale and set into boxed “rooms” of content – think of the forest sublevel in Caverns of Thracia, or the “Upper Works” sections of something like T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil or Abbey of St Clewd. You’re “outdoors”, yes, and there aren’t strict walls and corridors, but the flow of the area is closely related to the Dungeon Adventure – the ground covered is a few square miles at most, the space is amenable to the use of dungeoneering skills, etc.
 
D&D’s rules, particularly in older editions, naturally tend towards the Dungeon Adventure. Even our language of “levels” comes from that background – but the assumptions of player choices and of the actual mechanical skills provided in Original, Basic, and First all also assume an enclosed and “networked” environment.
 
Design-wise, the Rube Goldberg element of D&D comes to the forefront in these adventures – things are placed in very close proximity that can explosively interact and provide the players with opportunity or danger. This requires a serious approach to mapping. These adventures are the hardest to design geographically, because for your players to successfully apprehend the nature of the space, the space must be rational and made from ordinary geometry. Rooms linked by stairs need to actually be next to each other, not warped out by your poor scale on one level.
 
The close proximity of encounters also means that the best Dungeon Adventures require a more serious reflection upon ecology. When tribes of humanoids are many miles apart, their co-existence is more plausible; when they are in neighbouring caves, as in Keep on the Borderlands, some deeper logic must be sought, or else a frank handwaving offered (which is usually unsatisfying).
 
The Wilderness Adventure
The Wilderness Adventure operates as an exact opposite to the Dungeon Adventure – it relies on the sense of vast space, of geographic confusion, of “natural” environments now being disturbed by the adventurers. The groundscale of the Dungeon is in the low square miles; the Wilderness Adventure is nearly always in three figures at least.
 
The Wilderness Adventure is not simply “a wilderness map”. It is a particular set of objectives set on a wilderness map; it is not simply the world itself. Dolmenwood is a campaign setting, with many vignettes and locales on its map – but it is not a Wilderness Adventure, insomuch as it is the setting as a whole. UK1 Beyond the Crystal Cave, the aboveland portion of S3 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, or D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth are all good examples of Wilderness Adventures.
 
The locale of a Wilderness Adventure can be anything appropriate; S3 is overland in the “ordinary” world of Greyhawk, UK1 is functionally on a demiplane, D1 is in the Underdark. To The City of Brass is extraPlanar.
 
Format of exploration can also vary – hexcrawls, pointcrawls, and “open map” experiences are all legitimate. The better adventures of this type will care about distance and travel, because they will provide measurable costs for the vast distances players traverse. It does not matter how these are measured, as long as they are measured and measured seriously. Slumbering Ursine Dunes is (probably) a Wilderness Adventure, as is Misty Isles of the Eld by the same author, both using pointcrawls; B10 Night’s Dark Terror is a hexcrawl, as is S3.
 
The challenge to players in the Wilderness Adventure ought usually to consist of a relatively limited amount of time versus a “mystery” of space. There is much ground to cover, dryads to placate, swamp hags to slay or gain tutelage from, wandering knights to recruit. There are micro-Dungeons to clear (of course, the Nested Adventure is legitimate, so long as it doesn’t collapse needful time constraints). There are ingredients to gather. The hurry around the map, the depletion of resources by the many challenges, the complex variety of terrains – these all contribute to creating a compelling situation.
 
The players are not worrying as much about precise mapping or procedure (traps must necessarily be less prevalent over such a large area – the statistical chance of characters simply missing them altogether must be large). The DM rolls for Getting Lost and Random Encounters, and will provide set encounters and obstacles in given hexes or paths. The thrust of the adventure is to plan their time well and triangulate their targets.
 
The DM has to make sure the wilderness seems lively but also wild, and also to ensure that the passage of time and space feels meaningful. “Dungeon dressing” here is, ironically, important – the sense that the characters are travelling across vast vistas, dealing with many challenges, with the weeks slipping away from them, is important.
 
The City Adventure
Finally, there is the City Adventure, which is perhaps harder to describe than the former two. This is partly because it is a hybrid – a vast space in which many Dungeon Adventures may be located; an enclosed space, too, with set limits and standards. A further complication is that simply being set in a city does not make an adventure a City Adventure! Sea of Blood is largely in a Sahuagin city, but it is only at points resembles the sort of Adventure I have in mind. Its dynamic is usually to frenetic and bloody for our purposes.
 
But I think there are distinguishable features for a City *Adventure* (rather than a City Setting – CSIO and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko are really both City Settings, though Marlinko blends into an Adventure at points).. It is an adventure that relies on a Fairly Peaceful Peopled Place. There are many places and many people to speak to; much sneaking about; much negotiation; Mini-Dungeons fitted to the setting, with depraved secret cults rather than humanoid-occupied caverns; the business of negotiating with the Thieves’ Guild over cuts and fees; the corrupt City Watch to manipulate.
 
The party needs to find the cult’s headquarters, and identify its leaders – but it cannot smash every door down, or simply set up factional warfare as it might in the Dungeon. Civilisation’s standards are different to the (ordinary) Wilderness or Dungeon. Roleplaying is emphasize, as are Thiefly skills and utility spells from the Magic-User.
 
It must be frankly admitted this is an underutilised genre of Adventure. I most quickly leap to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying adventures like “Shadows over Bogenhafen”. But there are some good D&D exemplars. Gabor Lux’s various cities (Gont, Baklin, and the City of Vultures material) have a distinctive flavour combining aboveground intrigue with vast undercities for Dungeon Adventures.  Some of the 2e Lankhmar material is spot on. Any good adventure that leans into fantasy noir tends to have a decent City Adventure component.  Discounting Vornheim as a toolkit rather than an Adventure or Setting, this is an area the OSR could really move into, it seems to me: specific and focussed scenarios set against a larger urban background.
 
The challenge for the players here comes in adhering to the loose rules of the place, of bypassing the relatively overwhelming force of the state’s forces, of negotiating their way between quite settled factions with skin in the game. There is an objective, and there is not the constant up-front danger of the Dungeon or sheer space to cover as in the Wilderness, but the objective is occluded. Where is it? Who may grant access? What alternative routes may be found? Which factions might help, and which will seek vengeance after?
 
The DM has to thoroughly people the City; it cannot simply be a concrete Wilderness, with vast unpeopled spaces, or spaces which might as well be unpeopled for all the good the crowd does. There must always be a jostle, the risk of pickpockets, overflowing tavern brawls. The hardest thing for the City is to make it feel alive – the actual dynamics of accessing a hidden space or discovering the secret High Priest really resemble a Dungeon puzzle or Wilderness gather-quest, depending on how the flow-chart works. The real difficulty is emphasizing the human dynamic of these discoveries, of the need to reckon with a whole city of allies and adversaries – and you never know which is which.
 
Anyway, what do you think? Are there other genres I have missed?