5 DnD Settings You Might Not Have Heard About

The topic of this post is quite explicitly stolen from Ben Milton's excellent video with a similar title (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4F67RFcW6E&t=4s). His version is more fun, better produced, and better thought-through than mine; but I'm lazy, so here we are.

If D&D is at its best – its very best, its primal best – when it involves players genuinely discovering the unknown, and DMs being spurred to real creative endeavour, then the world a game is set in is important. If every element of that world is predictable, then there is no discovery for the players, and the only creative impetus for the DM is one of rebellion against the staid world.

So here are five settings for you to get stuck into that will, I think, give players journeys of discovery and give DMs plenty to chew on. All five are nominally designed for old-school versions of D&D, chiefly versions of Basic/Expert (“B/X”) and 1^st Edition AD&D; though you can fairly easily port a lot of that across to 5^th Edition, it may be worth your while to get the free PDFs of B/X Essentials (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5606/Necrotic-Gnome/subcategory/28663/B-X-Essentials) and work from there.

(Yes, often the best setting is the one you design yourself. There's your caveat. But some poor uncreative types like me find the work of others a great aid.)

#1 – Hill Cantons by Chris Kutalik

Have you witnessed the pilgrimage of the Soldier Bears? Do you dare deal with the otherworldly Eld, those dreadful half-Eldar-half-David-Bowie fashion victims? And will you sell your loot to Fraza the Curio Dealer, who is entirely honest – good for pricing your goods, bad when his deep-seated racism has cause to emerge?

The Hill Cantons (available from Hydra Cooperative, https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/7124/Hydra-Cooperative?term=hydra+&test_epoch=0) is an acid fantasy setting designed for Labyrinth Lord. In the published range there are currently three books (Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, and Misty Isles of the Eld) and two cosmology PDFs. There's another one – the excellently-named What Ho, Frog Demons – coming soon (I think the art was fixed over the summer). What's so good about the Hill Cantons?

It's funny. The world will make both DM and players laugh. Everything is memorable, shot in technicolour. The locations are great – how about a crashed dimensional organic sailing barge made of gold full of religious ghouls? The NPCs are vivid – see Fraza above. The “monsters” are distinctive – do you even know what a Reverse Centaur is?

It's a world that's inspired me. I made a level of a dungeon set in this world, and it's about the most anarchically funny thing I've written. Twice players have assiduously sought out a hexagonal metal coin to activate the canopied table they found in the first level of the dungeon – and then laughing realization has dawned on them as a display lights up on the canopy, a drawer slides out with a disc and two flat-bottomed hand-tools, and the table begins to hum.

#2 – Veins of the Earth (and Deep Carbon Observatory) by Patrick Stuart

Veins of the Earth is the Underdark rebooted, turned into a mythic underworld. It's available in PDF at Drivethrurpg, and the printed version (a beautiful hardback) is available at a slightly above-the-odds price at Amazon. The book contains a lot of practical ideas and notes for running games in the Underdark, especially focussed round things like climbing, encumbrance in closed spaces, and generating caves as you go, but the “setting” is chiefly defined for me by the array of monsters and adventuring ideas.

Currency consists of light. Want to buy something? Away with your surface gold! That'll be 20 lumes, please – that is, 20 hours worth of light, in whatever combination of oil, torches, and phosphorescent fungus you like. Oh, initiative rolls are limited to those who carry light – those who are in the pool share that initiative. Everyone else is at initiative 0.

There are impossibly noble, chivalrous travelling knights who are also sentient humanoid trilobites. They cannot speak. There are sinister pseudo-humans with great knots in their stomach, offering fantastic loans at unconscionable prices, constantly seeking their “lost” children. The duergar are rebuilt as the model of an efficient work ethic, to the point of society-wide sociopathy.

This has become the default Underdark for my Haughty Fantasy games. I carry plenty of stuff over from other sources, of course – this is DIY DnD – but the idea of an alien, disturbing underworld is key.

I mention the standalone adventure Deep Carbon Observatory as well because it explicitly connects to a Veins-like Underdark, and the same brooding sense of sorrow intermixed with tear-inducing wonder runs throughout.

Also, the author can write.

“A spider that walks across your outstretched hand might tell itself a tale of what you are. It does not know. There are veins beneath the skin it takes to be the whole. The world you think you know is nothing but a shell, a thin carapace over the skin of the, deeper, unbound world below.

You have existed, up to this point, on the illusion of a plane, bordered by mountains, rivers, seas or the politics of maps, and this life has been a lie. Its borders are made up, its seas are gateways, its mountains are cradles of deep life. There is no plane. You were raised within a history running

back through recorded time, written in ink, carved in stone, scooped from clay, hidden in songs. Your primal myths are an eyeblink of the memory of that place. Your history is a candle burning out.

The real world, the deeper, more true world, is bordered only by light above and fire below, and perhaps not even by that.”

#3 – Dolmenwood by Matthew Norman and Greg Gorgonmilk

Do you like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? What about Neil Gaiman? This is that. Currently published in 8 'zines – Wormskin #1-8, available in PDF and POD on DrivethruRPG – and in an adventure, The Weird That Befell Drigbolton, there's a campaign book coming soon. The zines are nice artefacts, and full of gameable material – though there's flavourful detail, the text is also as terse as it needs to be. Cross-referencing across 'zines is a little awkward, but not impossible. It's worth it.

The Dolmenwood is a mythic forest which can slot into your fantasy setting or into late medieval/early modern England or wherever else, really. It's full of alien and dangerous fae, strange forest glades, strange and wondrous magic treasures, civilised yet sadistic goatmen, and country bumpkins who know more than they're telling you. There are also sentient badger wizards, so...

The “monsters” are distinctive (e.g., Neutral-aligned undead people who are flocks of ravens but mostly just like collecting weird stuff), and as in all the best settings, you can talk to them all, pretty much. The old-school style leans a lot on interaction with NPCs, because combat is very dangerous (cf Combat as War vs Combat as Sport), and this setting builds very intentionally towards that. I can't think of a single forced combat across the 'zines, even in the two-issue dungeon (The Abbey of St Clewd).

The setting also is generally successful in walking a fine line over “weird stuff”. The setting is full of weird stuff, and bounds into that dark fantasy horror territory sometimes, but always with a profound sympathy for actual people. It's not gratuitous. This is rare, and important; and it's the sort of quality that translates at the table, when the DM is sensitive to it.

#4 – Against the Wicked City by Joseph Manola

None of this is formally published, which is a pity; it's all on Joseph's blog. The upside to the lack of books is that it's all free! You can find the collated information here: http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/p/against-wicked-city.html.

Joseph's own simmary:

“ATWC is a fantasy role-playing game about adventurers struggling to free a city from tyranny and corruption. It’s about other things too – there’s a whole world out there, containing everything from underwater cities of green glass to killer robots built by insane toad-men – but the core idea is right there in the title. There’s a great city. This city has fallen into wickedness. It’s up to you to set the people free.

In terms of its thematic underpinnings, ATWC is a game of romantic clockpunk fantasy with a setting inspired by early modern central Asia.”

The most important word in there for me is “romantic”, which Joseph defines thus:

“Romantic, insofar as this is fundamentally a game about love and hope and courage and our capacity to triumph over corruption. The Wicked City is a horrible, horrible place, and horrible, horrible things are done there; but ATWC does not assume that the struggle against such horror and evil is necessarily a hopeless one, and my expectation is that any long-running ATWC campaign will end with the liberation of the Wicked City from the bondage of evil which afflicts it.
As written, this is not a cynical game; but it is a game which is enormously sceptical of the redemptive power of violence. (That's why I'm running it with OSR D&D, which ensures that violence is usually a terrible idea!) The evil of the Wicked City cannot simply be stabbed until it falls over and dies; defeating it will require the ability to connect with and unite a whole variety of people and communities, all of them more-or-less damaged and mistrustful, and this in turn will ultimately be possible only through an effort of empathy. (There may also be quite a lot of stabbing along the way, though.) If you think all that sounds like feelgood hippie bullshit, then please feel free to run it as a grimy horrorshow in which evil always triumphs, or as a straightforward tale of national salvation through heroic bloodshed; but the assumption, throughout, has been that this is really a game about love.”

If I'm honest, reading that almost makes me cry. You can keep your stylish storygames with complex and intelligent mechanics for navigating teenage romance; I'll take my six boring ability scores and a random assortment of items, because, out on the steppes of the Wicked City, “this is really a game about love”. Magnificent.

The copious rules material supports that, by the way. You start with five classes available to players: the Fighter (the only person who's much good at combat, and who can automatically bust down any normal door); the Scholar (who knows any mundane fact required of her); the Traveller (who never gets lost); the Trickster (who is a bit of a rogue but can also charm his way into any party he wants); and the Noncombatant (who enemies always ignore til after they've smashed someone on the head with a vase, and who can nearly always escape imprisonment). You don't start with wizards and clerics. You start with classes that are 1) all just great at something – automatic successes at the thing they're expert at; 2) modelled towards social interaction and lateral problem-solving. Each class also has equipment tables, which you roll on to see what you get. Two examples from the d6 table for the Scholar:

*Clockworker's gear: Sturdy leather work clothes (treat as heavy leathers, +3 AC), locked box full of delicate tools, another locked box containing a half-finished machine that you're currently tinkering with, pocket watch, 3d6x10 sp.

*Historian's gear: Comfortable travelling coat (treat as leather jacket, +1 AC), 1d3 books, 1d6 tiny but intriguing ancient artifacts, locked box containing in-progress historical manuscript, charcoal for sketching, paper and ink, 3d6x10 sp.

No starting weapons for the scholar (other classes are slightly better off). Their equipment load, instead, all creates stories and hijinx. The clockworker's delicate tools have all sorts of uses. So does the pocket watch. And you need to complete that machine. The historian has charcoal and weird artifacts, and wants to find out stuff to finish their book. This is great. Proper D&D stories well up from a guy with no real combat ability and a random assortment of starting items.

There are other classes. Players unlock them. By becoming their friends. Want to be a Disciple of the Word, shouting words of divine power in service of your god? How about a Brass Man, a clockwork person following the semi-mythical Cogwheel Sage? Befriend them. Serve their needs, aid them in their hour of trial. This is a story about love.

The monsters are weird and inspired by Central Asian mythology. There are loads of tables to generate content on, including frankly the best, most sensitive presentation of religion in an RPG I've seen. There are two adventures – one is a dungeon environment which very much plays to the strengths of the setting, one is an investigation adventure. I've run both, they're both good. And all of this is free.

#5 – Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luke Rejec

Currently available as a limited overview document on DriveThru and for Patreon supporters of Luka Rejec (https://www.patreon.com/wizardthieffighter/posts). It's heading to Kickstarter. Luka does art for the Hill Cantons books, but he's also a marvellously creative writer. I haven't got UVG to the table yet, but I've loved reading it. This is Luka's summary:

“The Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a rules-light rpg pointcrawl module inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games. It takes a group of ‘heroes’ into the depths of a vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of time and space and fuzzy riffs.”

Or again:

“A world begins when it emerges from the mists of time. So it is with the civilizations of the Rainbowlands, which mark their count from when the Long Ago ended and the Now began.

The Rainbowlanders are the humans of a later era, undisputed masters of the fertile lands around the Circle Sea, dwellers in the Eye of Creation. They come in many shapes, colors, creeds, and faiths. They pile unkempt technology and misremembered lore together into a teetering whole. They rule the settled lands under their polychrome deities of ill-repute.

This story is not their story. This story begins at the edge of their world, at the Left End of the Right Road. At the westernmost outpost of humanity, the Violet City. Bastion against the hordes, entrepôt to the exotic sunset lands, and last port of civilization before the trackless steppe studded with the detritus of the Long Ago.

The last glimmer of the Rainbow before the skinblistering glow of the Ultraviolet Grasslands.”

So you travel long distances, possibly in futuristic RVs. You go to weird, confusing locales. You salvage ancient technology and try to piece together the past. You meet, uh, interesting people and try not to go slightly mad from the interaction.

On the Catlords of the Violet City: “The Purple God(dess), divinity of magic, and most prominent deity of the Violet City has a fondness for cats. Indeed, cats are the rulers of the Purple Land, running it through their doting human servants.”

The Porcelain Princes are “Not-quite-liches who seek immortality by spreading their vital cognitive essence among several bodies linked by real-time glandular psyche-to-psyche links. Customarily, they each polybody entity uses the same porcelain masks for every one of its drones.”

There are some great light rules for running your caravans on their long journeys – simple ways of dealing with rations and so forth. The locations are fascinating. How about the Grass Colossus?

“Crossing a last purple ridge, the wide vale promised respite from the harsh grassland. Trees dotted the courses of two rivers, and at their juncture prehistoric ramparts of pitted ceramic, traces of pre-wizard spell-arms on their ancient shellac surface.

Inside, on one of two hillocks, a great wicker-man of woven grasses, vines and thorn bushes. Shamans of many clans make their meets here, teach their memory chants, and welcome the clan mothers once a year for the festivals of the Circle of Grass.”

Which is as much of a proof as you'll need to know that some of the best writers of fantasy today are creating elfgames on the internet.

How Do I Start A Campaign?

So, you have somehow found friends, bought dice, and been tasked with running a D&D campaign. How do you start running a campaign? Well, the first step is having some kind of campaign in mind. There's a number of questions you'll need to answer: what edition of D&D, what genre of play, etc, etc. I don't want to answer those questions; that's on you. What I want to talk about here is about building a world to run a campaign in. There are three meta-options for you to consider.

META-OPTION 1: THE NEW TOLKIEN, OR TOP-DOWN CREATION

So, you can create languages from the bottom up, plan the geography of an entire world, create a fantastic Sanderson-esque magic system. That's good, and that's fun – though, of course, most of the fun to be had there will be by you, the DM, not your players. Most of the stuff you make will never transfer to your players. That's fine, just be aware your impulse to Play Tolkien is as much a way of you spending your own time as it is preparing a game for others to play.

META-OPTION 2: SMALL BEGINNINGS, OR BOTTOM-UP CREATION

Or you can create a little town and a couple of places for players to explore – there's a ruined Elf Tower (...New Mexiccoooo...) in the hills, strange tunnels carved out of onyx underneath the town, and nomadic boarmen crossing the plains nearby. Which empire is this part of? Who knows. In the marketplace, there's a birdmess-spattered statue of some old hero; who is it? We'll work that out later. Where are the boarmen going? Follow them to find out! This is a fairly simple way to start a campaign – sketch out a few “safe” locations and a few “dangerous” locations, drop the characters in it one way or another, give the players some rumours about the local area, and let them at it. Make more up as you go.

META-OPTION 3: PLUNDER THE BOOKS, OR THE MASH-UP

Probably actually the most common form of campaign; use a book or books published by others. Change it where you want to. Maybe glue bits from different books together (not literally, really damages the resale value). An example: I'm about to start running a game set in Chult, in the Forgotten Realms, using Chris Perkins' Tomb of Annihilation as a basis for it. But there's a number of issues with that book; some of them have to do with the expectations of a campaign (which I've changed), but some have to do with it being an exploration campaign with nowhere near enough locales. So I've added the two official-ish supplements to that, The Tortle Package and The Lost Kenku; but I've also thrown in James Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer, Kiel Chenier's Blood in the Chocolate, Ken Hite's Qelong, and a bunch of unofficial ToA supplements from the DM's Guild. Some of that stuff will need adaptation, for sure, but that's fine. Even the ToA supplements will be hacked to fit my version of Chult and my campaign needs; I don't need linear adventures, for instance. I need lots of adventure locations and dynamic environments, because that empowers player choice.

But whichever of these you do, you're going to need to end up with a place for your players to start, for them to adventure in, became heroes/villains of, etc. So whether you want to create the world top-down, bottom-up, or via the mash-up, there is a similar objective in mind. Now, one solution – a version of Meta-Option 3 – is just run your players through a set of published adventures, one after another. You set the scene: “you've been hired to do this...”, and the players function within the game as you've delineated. This is good for pickup play, for quite casual groups, and for very irregularly-scheduled campaigns; people turn up knowing they'll have an adventure. You'll need to pick interesting adventures (hint: don't play Pathfinder Adventure Paths unless you're using Joseph Manola's condensations of them – see his Against The Wicked City blog for more), but this is a perfectly reasonable way to run the game that probably reduces your workload.

But what if you want to emphasize player decisions at the campaign level? What if you want them to be the chief agents of change in a world, the architects of the rising and falling of kingdoms, even? Then you need a world with real choices for the players, even at 1st Level. They need to be able to pick which adventures to go on, and then allowed to determine their own objectives within that adventure location. So if you want to run that sort of campaign, here's what I'd recommend you come up with (by whatever method):

A REASON: This is simple and only matters for the first ten minutes of your first session, really. But why are your characters in the setting? It can be as simple as: this is a place where adventurers come; the characters are adventurers. It might help to establish why the characters are together before starting the game proper, too, to avoid confusion or the negative play habit of one character essentially forming their own party and doing their own thing the whole time.

THE TOWN: Doesn't need to be a town. Could be a yurt village, a strange and rambling inn and wagonhouse, whatever. The essential point is: there is a point of light the adventurers rest in, hear rumours in, may feel inclined to defend. There may be adventure locations in or beneath The Town, and you might have fun encounter tables for them as they spend their downtime there, but the key thing is that this can function as a home base. They're not constantly attacked by dragons when they're there. There are shops or traders or whatever. There are one or two “questgivers”; the weird shaman always wants ingredients from out of the way caves and bogs, and the Peace Chief wants the boarmen scared away from their current path without a proper fight.

DUNGEONS, PLURAL: By dungeon I also mean: bandit camp, strange outlying village, ruined observatory. Places that adventures happen. It can be a simple location with one puzzle or a multi-level, 159-room True Dungeon. A mix of size and type is good. This places are dangerous – hence why only adventurers would dare going – but they shouldn't be unrelentingly hostile, and solely full of combat. Make sure there are potential allies out in the wilderness. At least one baffling, strange, and slightly disturbing location.

A MAP?: Optional, but sometimes helpful for visualization, even outside of a proper hex-or-pointcrawl. Even if it's just a flowchart or set of nodes. The Yurt Village is in the centre, or at one edge; then there's the Puzzle Swamp, the True Dungeon, the Boarmen Stomping Grounds, and the Ruined Obsevatory. As there's a Dark Conspiracy at the Yurt Village, that gives you at least five adventure locations waiting for your players.

RUMOURS: You can just have an NPC hire the PCs to do something, or otherwise incentivize their action. But you might benefit from giving the group two or three “rumours” to start with; this lets them choose what seems most valuable to them. Maybe they start with these three:

“The Peace Chief needs help with the Boarmen, and is willing to reward any who offer aid.”

“She who solves the cog puzzle in the Putrid Swamp is sure to receive great riches...”

“Some say there is no bottom to the Spiral Dungeon, until it meets the Fire Below. But the strange artifacts within are surely of some bygone race.”

With that, I'd say you're more than good to go.

REVIEW: Tomb of Annihilation

This is going to be a fairly detailed review of Wizards of the Coast's Tomb of Annihilation adventure (for 5^th Edition of D&D), and the first in a mini-series of reviews of Tomb of Annihilation-related products. I'm writing these up partly for the sake of my own process as I prepare a campaign set in Chult, using ToA products (though with some hacking to make it tick). Partly they hopefully help other DMs planning to run it. This will include the official Tortle Package supplement, as well as some well-produced material from the DMs' Guild, which has obviously had a lot of thought put into it. So basically, anyone playing in my Meeple Games Chult campaign, look away now.

Here's the takeaway: Tomb of Annihilation is pretty good. In fact, at points, it verges on VERY good, and there's not many other Wizards' DnD adventures I'd say that about. Its flaws are real, however, and they are mostly the same issues that plague all Wizards adventures. Let's go chapter-by-chapter – it's tempting to do a Pros/Cons list, but there's a lot of content here to consider.

Introduction

There's a bit of general intro guff here, but there's a lot of theoretically usable material: an adventure summary which sums up the presumed course of play, and gives a useful summary of NPCs with relevant information to that end. Now, I won't necessarily use this, as I don't presume my characters will follow the “storyline” (roughly, famous Lich is growing a baby Death God to maturity, and sucking in souls from the surrounding plane to feed it), but it's useful. Also useful is a mechanical summary at the outset of how the Soulmonger – the device Acererak the Lich is using to suck in souls – affects play. I don't actually love how pervasive the Soulmonger's “Death Curse” is, for various reasons, but again, it's no bad thing to put this all up front. There's stuff on character advancement, and starting at higher levels. There's then a hook to get characters involved in the main plot.

It's dreadful, and not just because it decides there's a main plot the characters must care about (which puts a lot of expectation on players who are investing in the game for months or years). The hook is ridiculous. An archmage who is being affected by the Death Curse – she's been resurrected before, and so is losing health due to the Soulmonger's effect – hires the 1^st level PC chumps to investigate the source of the problem, in distant Chult (in the Forgotten Realms, 5^th Edition's default setting). The book does answer the question why she isn't sending more powerful or competent people – she already has and they disappeared. So you are now the counsel of despair, it seems, dear players. It becomes clear over the course of the book that, “in the story”, other high-level resurrected people haven't bothered sending anyone to investigate. So the hopes of the world rest on the Chump Brigade. Which may sound dramatic to you, but I think it's mind-numbingly stupid.

There's then an overview of Chult; the majority of this is a description of the races of Chult, which include the way local subspecies of Goblins and Dwarves work. There's also a sidebar on local religion, which mentions the absentee local deity Ubtao, but doesn't mention his key role (now neglected) in keeping world-ending danger Dendar the Night Serpent in prison. This is all fine, if generic and written at some length. But at least some of the space in this subsection – and in the Introduction as a whole – could have been given over to an organized overview of the factions in the setting. There's a sidebar on Acererak, but little else. However, there's plenty of potential factional play, and some of it even gets explored elsewhere; factional play is good because it gives players choices, and choices which have a significant effect on the setting (rather than the standard adventure assumptions of the setting having significant effects on the characters' actions).

Chapter 1 – Port Nyanzaru

So this starts out with the statement that Chultans now rule themselves in the main Chultan settlement, having chased out colonial forces nine years ago. Chult is fantasy Africa, and so you can understand the concern; the historical neglect of actual Chultans in Forgotten Realms material has made the authors wary. But this seems like an obvious missed opportunity for real intrigue and choices – the idea of a Governor from Amn co-existing uneasily with local Merchant-Princes who themselves are split between oligarchic and monarchist ideologies, all of that with other colonial powers in the mix, and weirder forces out in the jungles...your players might actually have to make moral decisions! But that's immediately flattened out, and the possibilities are only ever touched upon.

There's some stuff on arrival which is over-descriptive but fine, and then 10 side-quests which you can get the players involved in. At the end of the chapter there's also a d100 table of, uh, 19 rumours, and an additional 10 random encounters for Port Nyanzaru in Appendix B. Not amazingly layed out or usable at the table. But there's some nice ideas in all this, and it definitely aims to make the campaign rich and interesting. Several of the side quests give you opportunities to introduce some of the “international factions” of the Forgotten Realms – the Harpers (secretive freedom fighters), the Zhentarim (international crime syndicate), the Lords Alliance (the United Nations of “okay” city-states). The problem is these factions are terrible. There is somewhere in the book a suggestion that different members of the Lords' Alliance might clash over colonial objectives if put to it, but that's not explored. Otherwise, generic shadowy Neutral-leaning freedom fighters, generic shadowy Evil-leaning criminals, and generic Lawful-leaning political guys are about as drab as it gets. I don't want to help any of them. (Also, these terrible factions come up in every official 5^th Edition adventure. We're supposed to think they really matter, because they're everywhere. They don't matter. At all.)

The main map and key for the city of Port Nyanzaru comes next and is okay. There's some genuinely fun things – execution by dinosaur funnel, some vaguely interesting local NPCs, undead occasionally attacking the suburbs – though it's not terribly exciting, and the entries are long without always giving much value. This is followed by some fairly decent stuff – descriptions of the seven Merchant-Princes, each of whom has some kind of subplot/quirk available for use in play. There's then a sample Merchant Prince's Villa map and key, including particular motifs to customize each of the individual Princes. This is literally, and openly, generic; in this case I don't mind, as it's giving you maps and ideas for stuff players might actually do (you know, like raid a Prince's villa!). There's some nice stuff in here like a Fire Elemental trapped in service as a sauna-heater.

Next we get an actual summary of “Factions and their Representatives”, but though it mentions actual local players, it spends valuable words on redundant factions and doesn't really talk about any interplay between them. It also doesn't mention what local politics there actually might be, mostly focussing on the “international factions” who turn up in other books. As mentioned, terrible. Then there's a very brief section on weird miscellaneous things you can do like bet on dinosaur racing. Then a section on local guides who can take you into the jungle...and this is actually excellent. Sometimes verbose but great. There's a weretiger who will guide the PCs for free if they do a sidequest for her, and guides described as “disguised couatl”, “incompetent fortune hunters”, “barmy dwarf dragon slayer”, “Chultan druid and vegepygmy”, and “Yuan-ti spy”. The dwarf will deceive the PCs into thinking he can guide them anywhere but will actually just take them to kill the red dragon who ate his arm. This is great stuff. It should be noted some of these guides – and some of the factions – aren't actually in Port Nyanzaru, and though it makes sense to put together the info on all of the guides, it's not entirely satisfying organization.

Chapter 2 – The Land of Chult

So this chapter details the hexcrawl element of the adventure. Did I mention there was a hexcrawl? There's even a gorgeous map. The problem is, broadly speaking, that it's a bad hexcrawl. Some of the locations are great; I'll get to that in a second. But this chapter sums up a lot of the problems with this adventure, and with all published 5^th Edition Wizards' adventures I've read.

ONE. Adventure Style. This adventure has a hexcrawl as a major part of it, with the theme of exploration pushed forward (with a players' version of the hexmap they can fill in by hand!!), even down to awesome guide NPCs being detailed. The second paragraph of this chapter says locations are intentionally not located/sorted by level or difficulty, because players need to judge when to fight, negotiate, or flee (and we've already read about how to replace characters who die, whose souls are lost to the Soulmonger). There are loads of locations detailed – something like 47 in about 50 pages, including several mini-dungeons.

That's all quite admirable, and exciting for some of us who like that kind of adventure. But the actual material doesn't in any way help it be a good version of that adventure. Player choice and consequences aren't really valued: in the second paragraph of this chapter it discusses how to get your players out of trouble if stuff gets too hard for the PCs.

The hex map is massive, with 10-mile hexes, which only map on to “normal pace” when travelling, not slow or fast – which makes it a little unwieldy. It also means there are absolutely enormous distances being covered, using an “okay” random encounter table (which I'll address under Appendices). This isn't very attractive, and doesn't make the exploring seem very exciting. Furthermore, there are virtually no locations in the southern and eastern sections of the map; that's all just empty space, unless you put work into populating it. That might sound like a good creative exercise, but if I'm buying a 240+ page adventure with a hexmap, I would love for it to be usable and worthwhile from the off. If half the map is essentially empty, that's a waste of paper and potentially of player time.

The location gazetteer is affected by this. It has LOADS of great stuff, and I don't want to detract too much from that, but let's take some examples from Fort Beluarian, Baldur's Gate local base. The Fort is fun; it has some interesting stuff going on, including a Lawful Evil commander who you can choose to get along with or undermine. It also takes 4 pages to detail a fairly generic fort. Let's rewrite two paragraphs. From the introduction to the location:

“Liara is puzzled by reports coming from her patrols to the south. They've crossed the trails of large creatures in the jungle that don't match anything known to live in Chult. The characters are planning to explore the region between the east coast and the River Tiryki, or they've already been there and seen anything unusual, she'd be grateful for any light they can shed on the mystery. (Her patrols are seeing signs of the frost giants searching for Artus Cimber.)”

How about:

“Liara has had reports of tracks of large humanoids unknown to her patrols (Frost Giant patrols from the Hvalspyd). She may hire characters to explore the region, or pay for information from those who have already done so.”

That's two and a half lines saved for something else. Now, one of the keyed locations:

“2. ORE GATE

Despite its name, this secondary gate on the south wall of the fort has nothing to do with ore. It's a sally port the fort's defenders can use to launch counterattacks against enemies assailing the main gate. It stays solidly closed and barred most of the time.”

This can be trimmed down dramatically:

“2. ORE GATE: Sally port. Closed and barred.”

This sort of fairly basic editing carried out throughout the chapter would free up acres of space for the purpose of detailing/creating other locations. I'm fine with the book expecting DMs to do some work in detailing locations in such a big setting, but that doesn't justify the incredible waste of space on show.

There's also the wider issue that the locations detailed are often chosen and written with an eye to advancing the “main plot”. Though the adventure sets itself up as an open world hexcrawl with an eye to player choice and consequences, the book itself makes clear that the only worthwhile

That said, some of the mini-dungeons are pretty good, as I said. Hrakhamar is an old dwarven mine inhabited by firenewts which has some good looping and some fun mechanical interactions. Kir Sabal, home to the hidden heir to the throne of Omu and a bunch of quite nice aarakocra, is detailed as a dungeon in case you want to rob it, which is exactly what some players will do. The Wyrmheart Mine has some good verticality, you can negotiate with the dragon there, and her loyal kobolds actually raise young, which makes them slightly less easy to genocide away with impunity. Then there's a random goblin village which can be launched via catapult if it needs to escape, and the locals farm ants. Barring some layout issues, this is all very usable, even if it needs some highlighting.

Chapter 3 – Dwellers of the Forbidden City

This relatively short chapter (the shortest full chapter in the book) is named after and inspired by the classic module I1, a 1^st Edition module by David “Zeb” Cook. It's materially very different, but the DNA is there – the concept of an exotic ruined city ripe for exploration, with factions aplenty. However, this idea isn't taken too far. There is factional play – Yuan-Ti, Kobolds, Grungs, Thayan Wizards, some Tabaxi hunters – but it's fairly lightly covered and the locations detailed lean heavily in favour of those that directly advance the “main plot”.

Let's talk about that. 11 of the 20 locations are directly connected to accessing the Tomb of Annihilation; one is the Yuan-Ti base, one is the Tomb of Annihilation itself (both detailed in different chapters). The other nine are the Shrines of the Nine Trickster Gods of Omu, who the people of Omu turned to after their god Ubtao left them. These are all mini-dungeons focussed on puzzles, which allow access to the nine puzzle cubes needed to access the titular Tomb of Annihilation.

The Trickster Gods are interesting – and are an interesting element in play in the Tomb itself – and the shrines are pretty good. They each have riddles at their gates which give clues to how to solve the puzzles within. The puzzles are mostly “solvable”, which is nice; observant players should work them out, and not be forced into hint-begging. Most of the shrines require combat, which is a shame; though they encourage careful play and player skill as to the puzzles, blunt force enforced combat works against that style of play.

So great, you're collecting the puzzle cubes for the Tomb of Annihilation (there are a few ways of working out they're needed). Collecting them gets the PCs into direct conflict with the Yuan-Ti, who are reluctantly allied to Acererak. Those are both fun. But once you have eight of the cubes...the Yuan-Ti automatically steal the ninth, and leave an obvious trail so you have to go and clear their dungeon. I object to this – not so much because the Yuan-Ti might react in such a way, but because it “trapdoors” the players into a dungeon they may have sought to avoid. It's a version of the Quantum Ogre - “you WILL clear this dungeon, peon players!”. The PCs have to have a chance to outthink the Yuan-Ti and get all the cubes straight up. I'll have to think about how to change this.

Some of the other keyed locations are interesting. There's an overturned wagon with a nature spirit who could become friendly with the PCs, whilst underneath the wagon there's a Rosetta Stone-style tablet that lets the players translate ancient inscriptions in the city. You can rescue a grung from being thrown into some lava, and that lets you negotiate with the grung tribe which guards one of the Shrines. There's an amphitheatre full of dinosaurs including a massive T-Rex, which is kinda fun.

Omu isn't as much of an obvious lost opportunity as the general Chult chapter; it suffers from the same word-bloat and layout chaos, and is overfocussed for my tastes on getting PCs into the two big dungeons in the book, but it offers a bunch of gameable content.

Chapter 4 – Fane of the Night Serpent

So let's set aside the complaint that PCs are forced to go here, no matter how smart they are. This is a good dungeon, full of Yuan-Ti seeking to unleash a terrible and ancient evil (but not the death god in the Tomb of Annihilation). Why is it good?

ORDER OF BATTLE. There's a detailed roster of the Fane's inhabitants, including their reactions to the alert being raised if the PCs are on the loose inside. There's also a list of potential reinforcements who can arrive to fight the PCs or to restock the Fane. This makes the dungeon a living place, and is exceptionally helpful to the DM actually running it – there's no endless searching to find out who's where, but a single reference point.

LOOPING. There are at least two ways into every major area on the map. Players get to decide how they storm the keep – they can sneak around, they can find alternate routes, and so forth. This is both interesting in play and also is a way of emphasizing player agency.

NPC INTERPLAY. So the second-in-command of the Fane, the Naga priestess Fenthaza, will potentially ally with the PCs against her leader. There's a bunch of detailed prisoner NPCs who can be freed; some might reasonably join the PCs in an uprising, others need the PCs to look after them. There's also a bigger group of slave labourers who have been drugged into submission but could be roused. This means even in a dangerous dungeon there's a chance for social interaction, and different ways to solve the problems facing the PCs.

The environment itself has some nice weird things – dark oracle pools, blood altars, a hydra living in a lake – but I wouldn't say it's an inherently exciting setting. Its real merit is the dynamic behaviour of its inhabitants, and the physical design of it qua its dungeonic nature. It could, fairly easily, be dropped into another game; take away the alliance with Acererak, work out an alternate key treasure to the puzzle cube(s), and you've pretty much filed off the serial number.

One issue, though, is the effect of the Death Curse on the Yuan-Ti boss, Ras Nsi. Ras Nsi has previously been resurrected, and so is losing HP to the Death Curse. He starts the overall campaign with 107HP left out of his base 127; he is losing 1HP a day. Given PCs can travel one hex a day at a normal pace, and don't know where Omu is at the beginning of the adventure (and are far too low-level to deal with the Tomb), it will be some time before they arrive here. Of course, they may not fight Ras Nsi anyway, depending on the exact way things pan out in the Fane; but it's perfectly realistic that he could have 20HP or something when they arrive. It's not particularly improbable that he'll be dead by the time they arrive in Omu – which possibility doesn't seem to be accounted for, so far as I can see. Of course, the lamentable layout work might have obscured it. This is fixable, but requires either a serious look at the nature of the Death Curse, or simply making Ras Nsi immune to it (via not having been resurrected). That requires creating a slightly different source of tension between him and his second-in-command. All of that's fine – but it's work forced on the DM by content, rather than absence, in the book.

Chapter 5 – Tomb of the Nine Gods

Though the Tomb of the Nine Gods – that is, Acererak's Tomb of Annihilation – takes up a quarter of the book, it won't require that much space to review. That's because the flaws have been rehearsed above; layout makes it hard to use, the text is verbose, there's occasionally presumption of character intent (though much less).

Positives are often quicker to list. This is a good dungeon. It's about the largest one Wizards have ever designed, so far as I can think. I suppose some 3e/3.5e ones were pretty big, but certainly in 4^th I can't think of anything on this scale, and even in 5^th there's not much to compare it to. Technically Castle Ravenloft has 88 rooms to the Tomb's 81; but Strahd's lair takes up 56 pages compared to 66 for Acererak's. That's about the only competitor, as the largest dungeon in Princes of the Apocalypse takes up 36 pages, and none of the other adventures so far have a similar setpiece.

Size isn't everything, but in terms of offering a megadungeon experience with some longevity, this does it. Some of how it does it isn't just silly in the sense of comical (that's on theme for the book), but silly ludistically. What I mean is this: the environment is so various and so deadly that it essentially requires multiple runs and a roguelike mentality. That's not inappropriate or bad play, far from it, but it does inevitably lead to a different attitude to running the Tomb itself. In a similar vein, there are significant magic restrictions in the Tomb; though “coherent” (Acererak has put wards down or whatever), this is a less fun way of doing things. Rather than encouraging players to work out puzzles in creative ways – the purpose of the rule – it instead arbitrarily stymies them. A clear blanket rule over the types of magic warded against, rather than a bitty itemised list, would have been better. Even itemising effects by dungeon area (“this spell doesn't work against this”) would have been slightly better. (If nothing else, it's more of a pain for a DM to remember the 22 spells which have their rules changed than to know a general rule or just read the specific area.)

So it's a roguelike megadungeon. The fact it encourages learning is a key feature; you get to learn about traps from the evidence left by a failed expedition, by various riddles at each level, by the design itself indicating possible solutions; careful recon is also rewarded, with many hidden viewing ports and the like to use to analyse a room before you enter. This is a feature I think is generally well done. There are usually some common themes on each of the six levels, though not in the sense that each level is strictly “themed”; rather, one level is the lair of a Beholder, one is dominated by a puzzle where the rooms themselves are cogs in a gear puzzle, etc. Eventually, having collected 9 keys from the 9 tombs of the Trickster Gods (whose shrines you've already loote in Omu), you get down to the lair of the nascent death god Acererak is nourishing. If you defeat it and destroy the Soulmonger feeding it, you get to fight Acererak. That's the punchline of the campaign. There are a lot of ways down – multiple exits on each level, including ones skipping levels – there are countless puzzles, most of them good, and there are some interesting NPCs. NPC interaction isn't that heavy here compared to the Fane, but there is an Aboleth you can befriend (!), there's a Dao who can grant you wishes if you open his bottle, and so forth. It's a shame there's not more possible interplay suggested with the caretaker of the Tomb, Withers, or his Tomb Dwarves (dwarf zombie craftsmen!).

There's a lot of fun stuff here. Examples: a nycaloth librarian inspired by Gary Gygax; creepy dolls made by night hags which have trapped children's souls who can become your last best allies in the dungeon; the aforementioned rooms-as-cogs gear puzzle; the Trickster Gods sharing your body when you touch their corpses in their respective tombs; a bunch of prisoners and monsters stuck in Life-Trapping Mirrors, upon whose release some will aid you and some attack you; the five “key rooms” whose puzzles you have to solve to open the keyholes to the death god's lair, each of which has a solution partially dependent upon the specific shape of the keyhole it opens (Triangle, Square, Octagon, etc); and any other number of clever or fun things.

I suspect it'll take a moderate amount of prep to run – partly to bypass the endemic flaws of the book, partly because it's such a big environment. But it'll be worth it – it's full of clever challenges, and the players will earn the big moments as they learn to defeat and control their environment.

Appendices

The appendices take up some stuff, but are mostly stat blocks, magic items, etc. Some of this is fun, some is pedestrian. The handouts for each of the Guides from Chapter 1 are great. The Tri-Frond Flower is a great plant-that-can-kill-you an Chwingas are cute kodama-like nature spirits. The random encounter tables (Chult, Port Nyanzuru, Omu) I've mentioned already. There's some good material here, including a variety of social encounters and some fun interactive ones, such as a chwinga trying to steal something small from the PCs. There's a list of (fascinating) dead explorers, which is excellent if morbid. Even the less interesting encounters tend to have a nice throwaway detail or adjective. However, there are a lot of them – many fairly workaday – and many take more words than necessary.

There's also a good quality double-sided poster hexmap, one side of which has the interior of Chult largely blank, to allow for explorers to fill it out (roguelike!). The cartography is by the excellent Mike Schley. Of course, there are issues with the literal contents of the hexmap – as mentioned above – but it's a fantastic artifact.

Conclusion

Much like the book, I've used too many words to say what I've said; the summary is that this is good, but long. It's worth working through, but it does require work. It isn't entirely convinced of its own approach – it wants to be a challenging, lethal hexcrawl, but prior to the Tomb of the Nine Gods, it openly undermines those objectives, via ways of softening the world and therefore removing consequences, and also via a poorly designed map/world which encourages driving towards the “objective” (decided for your players in advance) as soon as possible. It is, however, full of invention, has a properly realized fantasy environment, and is not too far off where it needs to be. It's also probably a generally good resource for fantasy campaigns set in the jungle or where exploration is a significant factor; this is why, I think, Skerple of Coins and Scrolls has adapted it for his Pirates campaign.

This book oes, I think, affirm Chris Perkins as a legitimately talented creator of adventures, alongside Reavers of Harkenwold and Out of the Abyss. I'll probably put up posts in the future about my own edits to this (though Skerples has beat me to it!), which may be of use to others.

Random Encounters – Purpose and Design (and Thoughts on Player Agency)

I am not an expert DM by any means, but I think random encounters are a very, very valuable part of Dungeons and Dragons. What they are and why they're important isn't always immediately apparent to DMs; I'm going to try to explore those issues here.

I'm going to address four aspects of random encounters: the way they relate to player agency; the way they relate to the verisimilitude; how they help the DM at the table; and what makes a good random encounter.

Player Agency and Consequences

I've seen objections to random encounters along the lines that they get in the way of the plot or main quest or are just time-consuming. Partly there's an issue of the type of game people are playing here. If a DM is running a Final Fantasy style series of set pieces with a “cinematic” plot, then random encounters – much like random encounters in JRPGs – might just be annoying. Players want to get on to the cool stuff, and as – inevitably – random encounters will here be seen as further combat challenges, but without plot significance, everyone will want to skip them.

Even for that sort of game, however, I would suggest that there is another way to run the game that you might enjoy more, even if (especially if!) story is important to you and your group. This style will involve random encounters not just as a necessary evil but as an integral part. But it requires killing your darlings.

A digression here: DMs love writing plots. I certainly do. But in 99% of cases, when we heavily invest in writing a plot, our games will suffer for it. We will require players to do the things we want them to, or at least let them exercise only very limited agency.

On the other hand, letting players “decide” the story benefits everyone in the long run, in my experience. They may need some hints and tips, and of course it happens in your world so you'll have created the possibilities for them, but dropping the idea of having a plot or a main quest can reap great benefits for you. You might of course worry that not having a main quest might lead to the characters being unheroic or doing weird things. You're right, they might – and your players will have had fun deciding to act like that! (Also, how much more impressive is character heroism when it's not required by the story – when it's not necessarily the path of least resistance?)

Dropping your (the DM's) idea of a story/plot/main quest also lends more importance to the things that actually happen. Your players might decide to help the revolution or just utilise the chaos to loot shops. They might fight the dragon or side with the dragon. As these choices weren't inevitable, they will matter more to everyone – knowledge of the road not travelled makes decisions mean more.

(Example One: one of my players in Talon's Height snuck away and released the Prince Most Magnificent in Shimmering Smoke, a Lawful Evil Efreet, after the Prince telepathically contacted them and offered a deal. A JRPG-style game wouldn't have involved that possibility; but in this case, the player got to choose. His choice will have consequences, positive and negative. The same would be true if he'd not let the Prince out.)

Example Two: The same with the Dragon's Tooth, the home of my Lawful Neutral Kobolds who have tension with nearby civilised peoples but can make peace – my main group quickly negotiated with the Kobolds after realising they weren't self-evidently evil, whilst another group I took through it got halfway before even beginning to suspect something strange was up. They had already incinerated the Kobold's eggs!)

How do random encounters fit into this? They help in at least two ways: consequences and emergent gameplay. When your players go out into the wilderness, there are risks to them (and sometimes opportunities). If they stay out in the wilderness for long periods, there are more risks to them before they get to somewhere safe. Taking those risks will cost the players – in hitdice, spell slots, potions, etc. And those consequences will directly relate to their choice to go into the wilderness. If my players travel through the Brightwood, they roll against the relative risk of that table (which is 1/6 per hex travelled on the hexmap) and if an encounter occurs they roll on that table, which is moderately dangerous, has several fey encounters, and has encounters relating to certain factions/NPCs. If they're in Cabbage Country, it's 1/12 chance and they'll roll on that table, which is a little less dangerous but has a bunch of weird, mysterious events, and has encounters relating to different factions/NPCs. This connects to “emergent gameplay” - the idea no-one quite knows what's going to happen til the session gets there, with randomised elements helping to produce a unique story for each party in the same environment. One group encounters Goblin foragers connected to Nimthur in Cabbage Country; another meets Pumpkinhead. Their stories are permanently changed by an event no-one could truly predict – and it was, in the final account, due to their decisions that it happened.

(Hint: Make players roll to see if they get a random encounter, and then make them roll on the table you've got hidden behind your screen. They don't know what result they get, but it gives them a sense of investment/agency. The Bard rolled the check that got everyone captured by interdimensional raiders!)

Verisimilitude

Random encounters can also help a sense of verisimilitude – that is, of the world being “real”, being “alive”. Obviously the game is fiction; but players often enjoy the game the more they don't have to explain away inconsistencies or weirdnesses. Random encounter tables – out of the direct control of the DM – give us a way of seeing the world “move”, of having events occur, of having an interactive ecology.

Of course it makes sense that there's a risk of encountering strange things in the monster forest. The players know it's a 1 in 6 chance, but given how dice work, that could be never or often. (Of course, you could add to this by increasing the chance of an encounter if the characters are moving quickly, making more noise – adding more realism and more choice!) This to me seems better than DMs just writing preset “random encounters” for every three days of travel or whatever – things aren't inevitable, the world bites back, and even the DM gets to be surprised sometimes. Additionally, the random (emergent gameplay) combination of elements – location, character situation, particular encounter – give an opportunity for creativity, as the DM works out how the encounter works or makes sense.

An important corollary of this point is as follows: the encounter table shouldn't be strictly levelled, nor should it be an array of combat encounters. In your bit of mythic fantasyland there may well be no high-level dragons or breaches into the Abyss...well, there might be, actually. Why wouldn't demons make a reality breach here, where the locals are weaker, rather than into the high-level Dwarf King's fortress? Wouldn't it be interesting find out how how your 3^rd level party reacts when they find something SO dangerous? What if they come face-to-face with an Adult Green Dragon seeking a new home after being chased from its old one by giants? If they can't beat it, could they flee from it? What about negotiating with it? A Green Dragon in your debt sounds useful.

Of course it might make sense to only have one or two super-dangerous encounters on your table – partly because verisimilitude would suggest there's not enormous numbers of high-level dangers running around anyway, and partly because though realism helps, it's not the aim of the game. The aim is having fun, and so a mix of things is best.

Similarly, having random encounters essentially be combat encounters is boring. Not because combat isn't fun, or can't be; but because it will make players understand random encounters are part of the grind rather than part of the world. Virtually every random encounter on your table should be able to run in multiple ways. Sure, maybe one is just demons attacking, and that's going to have to be combat, but could the territorial heron-men be negotiated with? Perhaps some of the encounters should be strictly environmental – a strange circle of standing stones with magical properties, or a sudden lightning storm. Variety adds to a sense of realism, and to the potential interest players will have in the encounters themselves.

Ease of Use for the DM

Random encounters – and generally being able to randomly generate content – help a lot when your players go offpiste. What if you don't have things planned for the direction they're travelling? Dip into your encounter tables and find out what's there! These give you both floating encounters and something quick you don't have to have written out beforehand in detail. Of course, in some cases discretion may be required – when they ask to go to a town you haven't written up yet, you may be a little cautious about dropping the aforementioned Abyssal breach into it, at least if you have other intentions for the town. But bandits ambushing them en route, or them finding a cartman with a broken leg in the road, can provide you breathing space to work out what's happening next.

Designing Good Random Encounters

I don't know if I design good random encounters, and can't entirely describe how to design the sort of encounters I like, though certainly it helps if they are vivid and dynamic. But I can probably point to the sort of encounters I like and don't like.

A limited encounter table can be found in the (very worth reading) 1^st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. It has tables sorted by terrain, but the actual entries tend just to be the name of the creature encountered (e.g., “Giant Weasel”). There are no environmental encounters in the main encounter tables, with any such event presumed to be determined separately by the DM. The City/Town Encounters have a special Explanation section which gives a little more advice, but still no colour. Now, this might not seem a bad thing; this gives the DM the whole job of working out the encounter, which may seem desirable. But in my experience a few sentences to make an encounter vivid, or even just quick and easy to run at the table, are very helpful.

An example of a slightly better encounter table can be found in Tomb of Annihilation, a pretty good adventure from Wizards of the Coast. It again has a number of tables, spread across different terrain types. The encounters even have a paragraph of description each, and some are quite fun and allow for interesting interactions. For instance:

CYCLOPS:A cyclops is journeying toward its home near Snapping Turtle Bay. It isn't looking for a fight, but any sudden moves or hostility from the characters might trigger one. The cyclops knows the region around Lake Luo and the western end of the Valley of Dread quite well, and it's never seen anything like Omu in those areas. Roll twice on the Treasure Drops table to see what treasure, if any, the cyclops has.

You can fight it, but it's probably easier to make friends with it. It can give you information. So it's a decent little encounter – but perhaps not instantly memorable or exciting.

Compare these two encounters from one neighbourhood of Marlinko, the subject of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, an excellent book by Chris Kutalik available from Drivethrurpg. One of these encounters is entirely trivial, the other is frankly silly, and both are very briefly written (shorter than the Cyclops entry):

Drunken boors: 2d6 drunken boors. Will descend on party and demand they drink with

them. Will not let them talk without interruption.

Maus. A wild-eyed paranoid dressed in the long-robed, woolen hat finery of a rustic boyar.

Maus rants and raves at the characters about the “Axis of Tindrthurn,” a secret postal and

matchmaking service that he claims is trying to kill him. If the Chaos Level is 6 or greater, he

is correct on all counts.

Both of these, to me, are immediately even more engaging and full of possibility than the Cyclops encounter, even though the Cyclops is surely the more inherently dramatic encounter. There's still plenty left to the DM's judgement and imagination; but these are both vivid and full of possibility, all within a couple of sentences.

Conclusion

Go and write an encounter table for the town your players are exploring. Add a wandering monster table to the gigantic dungeon they're descending. Add some weird stuff, add some chances for them to make friends (or enemies), and then let them be the masters of their fate. Use random encounters to make your world more open to player choice, to make it feel more real, and to save you time when your players go somewhere you hadn't expected. I think you'll reap the benefits very quickly.