Arduin Intro to Caliban

Ok, hopefully my good intentions will not get me into trouble! Here (**** Sorry, I removed this link for now. I am hoping to run this scenario at DunDraCon 43 and NO PEEKING) is an introduction to David Hargrave's dungeon, Caliban, which includes the setting outside the dungeon and the ground level encounters and traps within. 

Unfortunately the entire dungeon, with three more levels, is not presently available (commercially at least, other than $50-$75 used copies), however, posting the entire dungeon will certainly be too much if the copyright holders complain.

What I have done is annotated this portion of the scenario with all the particular monster, spells, and magik items descriptions that one would otherwise need to have the Arduin rulebooks to supply.

My hope is that folks can gain a bit of appreciation for the type of extreme dangers and rewards inherent to an Arduin game. If one focuses on the magic items first, it is like "Holy Toledo!" but I counted about half of the monsters with life level draining abilities. Ouch!

This is a HIGH LEVEL scenario. Dave wrote others such as "Howling Tower" and "Citadel of Thunder" that were appropriate for lower-level characters.

Also, historically in Dave Hargrave's own campaigns, he ran a high-power Arduin campaign with these extreme magic items, and also a low-power Arduin campaign where magic items are incredibly rare.

If you see some attributes of this scenario you enjoy, at least in terms of monsters, items, and spells, you can check out the Emperors Choice page on DriveThruRPG for additional Arduin products. Note that The Compleat Arduin from 1992 and Arduin Eternal from 2009, as well as the system neutral World of Khaas book about Arduin, were all written by others after Dave Hargrave had passed away (Dave died back in 1988). Compleat Arduin and Arduin Eternal are also new game systems that moved away from old editions of D&D rules.

For my money, I cannot recommend enough the Arduin Grimoire Trilogy book. It contains Arduin history, monsters, spells, items, classes, and a plethora of random tables for encounters, weather, etc. plus the infamous critical hit and fumbles! This book organizes the first three classic Arduin Grimoires in a single tome, combining the categories from each into single references, while keeping everything in the original writings of Dave Hargrave - whose singular voice and contributions to the RPG hobby are often overlooked.

Also, these early works were written in mind of and are completely compatible with OD&D and current OSR retro-clone rules. (I have even run his scenarios using 5th ed. with only minor adjustments.)

Ok then, please enjoy and accept this in the spirit of encountering one of the true greats!

Caliban Annotated

Caliban, Arduin Dungeon Number 1 written in 1979, has long held a mythical spot in my D&D ethos. The dungeon was the highest level in Hargrave's repertoire published for Arduin by Grimoire Games and went out of print in 1986 (other than in a short-lived Arduin compilation, Vaults of the Weaver, from 2006).

Caliban is described by Hargrave as "... an area that appears at random intervals and inside random dungeons, caverns, and the like. It is also known as the Chalice of Chance or Random Heart. It has appeared in Arduin only twice in all of the knowledge of Elf or Human."

Spacin-Jason from our old gaming group probably ran us through Caliban, but I do not have a distinct memory of it, ha, which actually is not surprising one way or another.

In 2008 published in The Arduin Trilogy (which I believe is the absolute best Arduin product available: content of the original 3 Arduin Grimoires, as written by Dave Hargrave, compiled by Becky Osiecki into single resources for monsters, spells, items, classes, history, etc, plus the complete Arduin Adventure basic set.) is Caliban's Seat, a supplement describing the 18,000-ft. high mountain of Caliban's last appearance as well as the gardens and gates entering the dungeon.

Given that I possess both The Arduin Trilogy and Vaults of the Weaver in addition to many, many other Arduin resources, my current project is to produce a work of Caliban that is annotated with the monsters, treasures, and spells from the greater Arduin encyclopedia, i.e. ready to run as-is without referencing other Arduin gaming resources.

I am in the early stages and the dungeon seems like it will fit right into 5th edition rules for The World's Most Popular Role Playing Game. Arduin in the 70s was proto-D&D and monster stats include the ubiquitous hit die, hit points, and armor class, and also helpfully include a creature's Dexterity attribute score.

Spells, magic items, and monsters are almost always unique to Arduin.

This should be fun to run which I will do for my home group and also probably Friday night (2/15/2019) at DunDraCon XLIII.

Whiteout

The Man-With-No-Name awakes alone, opulent golden hatch open to the entryway hall exit door. Fully healed and stocked Man proceeds into hall, hatch sealing behind him with a hiss of pressurized air. The exit door opens with breezy chill to snowy white expanse. Once outside the Buddha Temple, as Man-With-No-Name surmised it would, vanished - lost to time or space. But Man was not alone in the frozen snow.

Reptile Cleric and McQueef the half-orc stood by, as also the dark-skinned half-elven ranger. One half-elf druidic personage of unknown character bemusedly surveyed the scene.

The distance hard to discern as horizon melded snow and cloudy sky, but to west are interspersed hillocks beneath the snow. To north the snowy plain extends to vision's limits. East on what appears as the horizon extends a beginning of grey backwoods, bereft of any greenery. And to the south perhaps a few hours march the snow-covered ground undulates as if a slow, wind-tossed ocean.

The party decides to venture southward where upon reaching the undulationous plain discovers acres upon acres of vast webbing over opposing armies frozen in battle. McQueef investigates closer and each soldier appears to have been dipped in fast-drying resin and permanently cohesed in their place of combat. The webbing fluttering over and among the soldiers is unbreakable and nonflammable. Reptile-cleric's ritual of detection reveals... powerful abjuration magic.

Half-Elf druid (Nimglin) calls forth earth elemental that begins to construct a 10' high, 20' by 20' earthen mound from on top of to pitch a tent. During construction half-elf ranger sends her white owl to survey the surrounding territory, communicating back to ranger that a small pack of wolves approach from south east.

As adventurers prepare defensively, loud howls and panicky growls are heard... until silence.

In the twilight before nightfall some things approach, appearing at first to be yak-faced mammals by Reptile cleric's and McQueef's 360-foot infravision, then to closer 90' darkvision the creatures are seen to be many-horned and float slightly above the snow, and finally, to within 60', the druid and ranger half-elves' colorized darkvision and closest proximity reveal half-dozen spiderlegged and many-eyed floating, drooling terrors. "Shoot, shoot now!" yells the ranger.

The terrors attack with telekinetic bolts, and become invisible as heroes return fire. In mind of druid terrors apologize and promise glorification "forever" as druid and ranger escape grappling druid's flying giant owl from figurine. When battle subsides, one creature ran off. However, its companions died, their corpses hissing and melting into the snow leaving mere scraps of colored cloth...

How to Play in a Sandbox

Northern Wilderlands circa 5434 BCCC (approx.)

Good grief, the things I do for my players... Someone presumably ignited the great planetary bomb device our heroes were originally sent to retrieve from the City of the Gods located in the Valley of the Ancients. Now, one thousand years later, civilizations of the Wilderlands have collapsed into barbarism from the unnatural geologic upheaval and global climatic cooling disrupting food production and other essential supplies.  Local warlords, of course, have exulted in the misfortune of their enemies and seized everything within their power.

Our group is updating our rules to 5th ed. version of The World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game. In conjunction with this I really hoped to use some of the indie resources Vornheim and Frostbitten & Mutilated by Zak Smith and also Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess. I needed a cold and barren wasteland pocked with destroyed civilizations cracking through the crust.

Given that I had run the party through the Judges Guild Blackmoor (First Fantasy Campaign version) blending in the TSR DA series and Wilderlands map 19 by Rob Conley from Fight On! issue #3, I already had most of the geographic framework. And I also had a big old sheet of overland hex paper from The Armory with which to draw upon the new cataclysmic environs.

What was not completely conceptualized (by me anyway) is that Judges Guild Blackmoor is 10 miles per hex which is double the Wilderlands standard 5 miles, resulting in an area 4 times larger than a standard Wilderlands overland map. So piecing map 19 with First Fantasy Campaign Blackmoor and the standard area Wilderlands overland maps left large gaps to the northwest and southeast.

Fortunately, there are two creations for Wilderlands expansion. One being the aforementioned Rob Conley's, the second is the much more vast (vaster?) Wilderlands of High Adventure by James Mishler's Adventures Games Publishing for Castles and Crusades system. James published maps including a continent-wide map containing the Wilderlands, Rhadamanthia, and a larger scale map of Western Karak on the western edge of traditional Wilderlands.

Thus I scaled and mushed everything for a complete campaign map.

And the amazing thing is that the portions of Mishler's maps actually aligned realy well with Conley's and the First Fantasy Campaign. Hurray!

P.S. I overlaid the rough map with 20-mile hexes courtesy of the published hex GIF file here. Doing the math was a pain in the ass, but the larger hexes in the image are scales at 20-miles based on the smaller 10-mile First Fantasy Campaign hexes. Ha, now I just need to draw the real map...

P.S.S. There are TWO large round features in Mishler's map showing deep into the Valley of the Ancients just about where I had deposited the City of the Gods that PCs never visited. Could there have been a pair of explosions?! Ha, and can you say radiation? I think you can...

Tex Ar-friggin-Cana...

(Tex Arcana #1, page 1)

Back in the days of yester-yore There was this artsy sci-fi & fantasy magazine called Heavy Metal that during the summer of 1981 (gawd, the summer between my junior & senior years of high school. Pretty much a blur, kinda fuzzy at least due to better living through chemicals... and beer) became mass-popularized by this artsy sci-fi fantasy movie called Heavy Metal.

Well, somewhere thereabouts 1980 I got me a subscription to the magazine, which was awesome (Mobius) and in March 1981 began following this here serial, Tex-Arcana, written and drawn by this dude, John Findley. The serial became intermittent at times, and had a break, and I let my subscription lapse and lost track.

Anyhow, I don't know what got me to thinking about ol' Tex Arcana, but I learned John has a Tex Arcana website that used to have all the comic episodes. Now it only has Book 4, "The Ballod of the Witch's Daughter."

However, through the magic of the Wayback Machine, you can read all the books, Tex Arcana from the beginning, here (a might teeny bit slower than normal). And you really should...

Metropolis of the Doomed...

Our heroes accost Juan at the entrance to "Toad Lounge" when up arrives a young twenty-something lad in a black leather jacket and beanie who instructs Juan to let them inside the lounge. This new rascally-looking fellow explains to the party that strange events have been happening since a strange artifact was unearthed at a large construction site in wetlands near the bay, a large maybe 3' length bookish thing wrapped in what appeared to be some sort of black reptile hide.

He says for Juan to open the storeroom, and there the party sees "The Librarian" recently left for dead who is very much alive. "Greetings," says the wormy creature, "I was wondering how long it would take you all to show up."

"Unfortunately an insanely powerful... thing... has be acquired by an insanely ambitious person in this time. This person has allied themselves with an academic who knows a very tiny bit of what you might call magic which is how I ended up here. Also unfortunately, forces from beyond time, essentially two alternative futures, have appeared to obtain this... thing... which appears to have relevance to some ultimate fates of the Multiverse."

The windows of the Toad Lounge are smashed with shouts of "Police!" "Down on the ground!"

"Run now," says the Librarian.

Juan shows the adventurers a private entrance which appears to lead off into a metallic hallway harshly lit by intermittent florescent light set depressed in the ceiling. Departing the party briefly hears a barrage of gunfire before the door closes.

The party moves forward for a time, realizing this is not some city walkway or building, rather a long, long passageway of rust, uncertain lighting, and foul smells. They immediately retrace their steps intending a return to Toad Lounge, but the doorway has vanished - only more passageway heading in the opposite direction.

Walking back in their original direction for a number of minutes, the party spies a soldier moving along in front of them. The mage-thief silently creeps up on the person from behind, only to discover the creature is an armed zombie!

A battle ensues attracting several other of these armed walking dead - dangerously lethal with high tech blaster weapons - however, the adventurers dispatch the zombies while suffering only moderate wounds. So they press on eventually discovering what appears to be a transit station for some type of railway operation.

Within this terminal there are windows indicating a stormy atmosphere outside, so the mage-thief endeavors climbing up to the ceiling to create an exit for he heroes. This is almost disaster as the new egress exposes interior to powerful winds bearing rains of damaging acid before mage-thief can re-seal the opening. Thus the party decides to follow the rail path tunnels to find what purpose they were made to come to such a harsh display. 

Encountering toothy, bulbous demons along the way the party eventually arrives at a gargantuan, domed chamber where an enormous cyber-enhanced demon is waiting...

Although terrific damages are sustained, the adventurers triumph against the cyber-demon, but are no closer to resolving their dilemma of how to escape this demonic metropolis. Looking out through the domed skylights, off in the darkened distance on a small range of hills on the periphery of the metropolis, Man-With-No-Name sees a fat, golden Buddha temple. "That is where we must go," says he...

Man-With-No-Name and half-orc barbarian, being the fastest and the strongest of the group, wrap the others against the acid raining down and run toward the temple, and once arrived Man-With-No-Name achieves entry through the temple's, seemingly gold, only door.

Inside, a disembodied voice speaks - "A pleasure to finally see you again, lo these many, many centuries passed." It is the voice of Matsuhara Yotsuya from the timeship. "Yes there are forces at work that in this branch of time were overcome by demons and chaos. Still there are other branches yes, and you all have unfinished business in Blackmoor. There was something of the Baron's daughter, yes. Wouldn't be helpful she was not saved, yes." The voice bids them to rest and replenish supplies. When ready, off the adventurers will go through time again as they are beginning to seem something of the epic forces to influence power and control of the Multiverse...

Channeling the D&D...

(c. April 15, 1977)

This is a piece of my "art" I found from age 12, just 9 months or so before I began gaming Dungeons and Dragons. Mostly my other doodles were rocket ships and race cars. I would say I was primed.