Old-School Essentials: Lairs and Dungeons

 This post is basically me trying to establish the answers to questions the keep coming on and on:

• What is a lair?
• What is a dungeon?
• Are lairs and dungeons the same thing?

I'm going to answer these questions first of all with what's in the Old-School Essentials core book, then trying to make logical conclusions from it. Since OSE is a bx d&d clone, such conclusions should apply to the "whole family" (probably including BECMI and its clones).

What is a lair?

Ok let's begin with good old Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Lair

a: the resting or living place of a wild animal.

        "we tracked the bear back to its lair"

b: a refuge or place for hiding.

        "a villain's lair"

Why am I starting with this? Because the rules offer no definition at all, so I believe the only safe path here is to assume "lair" means what "lair" means in ordinary English:

a monster lair is the place where monsters live, rest, and/or hide.

The Game Statistics (Monster) page in the OSE srd, under the Number Appearing (NA) section, gives us the following information:

Number Appearing (NA)

Listed as two values, the second in parentheses.

[...]

Monster lair in a dungeon: The second value lists the number of monsters found in a lair in a dungeon.

Wandering monsters in the wilderness: The second value indicates the number of monsters encountered roaming in the wilderness.

Monster lair in the wilderness: The second value multiplied by 5 indicates the number of monsters found in a lair in the wilderness.

Lairs are mentioned again right after that, in the Treasure Type (TT) section:

Treasure Type (TT)

The letter code used to determine the amount and type of treasure possessed by the monster(s) (see Treasure Types). The letters listed are used as follows:

A to O: Indicate a hoard: the sum wealth of a large monster or a community of smaller monsters, usually hidden in the lair. For monsters with a lair encounter size (see #Number Appearing) of greater than 1d4, the amount of treasure in the hoard may be reduced, if the number of monsters is below average.

This is basically all there is to it.

In the rules, a lair is defined by two things: 

• A variable amount of monsters (a "community");
•  a (usually specifically) associated treasure type.

Additionally, from the NA section we derive the following knowledge:

• A lair can be in a dungeon;
• A lair can be in the wilderness (and has 5x the monsters, but their treasure hoard stays the same!).

Accidentally, I think the first point takes us closer to answering the question "Are lairs and dungeons the same thing?" Spoiler: no.

Let's put it all together and this is the best answer I can offer:

A lair is place where a (typically large) group of monsters (often as an organized "community") live, rest hide, etc, and keep their "community" treasure hoard; monster lairs can be found both inside dungeons and in the wilderness.

Let's work an example?

The Goblin entry in the OSE srd has additional specific information for goblin lairs, so let's see what we get.

• A goblin lair in a dungeon amounts to 6d10 individuals (and x5 if the lair is in the wilderness).
• If encountered in their lair, the goblins have a type C treasure.
• A 3HD (15hp) king and 2d6 2HD (2d6hp) bodyguards live in the goblin lair.

These three pieces of information are the building blocks to create a goblin lair.

An average goblin lair in a dungeon amounts to about 30-36 individuals, plus a 3HD goblin king and 6-8 2HD bodyguards, and a treasure hoard worth around 1000gp.

Yes, that's a lot of enemies for some crappy loot... but type C also has a 10% chance to include 2 magic items!

Considering the swingy nature of random treasure, wise players should try to figure out if a specific lair is worth making an enemy of, before committing to attempted mass goblin murder. Their hoard might as well amount to zero...

Just for fun, let's also consider the largest, richest goblin lair we could finde in the wilderness according to the implied setting: 300 goblins, 1 king with 12 bodyguards, somewhere around 10,000 gp worth of treasure, and 2 magic items.

The only thing that's lacking is: where is this goblin lair? What kind of place is it?

For the most part, we can only answer using common sense and imagination.

The rules tell us it can be in a dungeon or in the wilderness.

In the wilderness, the lair can be anything the specific monster would consider a suitable "home": a cave, a ruin, a hole in a hill, a nest on a mountain peak, the inside of a volcano, etc. And also any type of "home" the specific monster might be able to build, in the case of intelligent creatures: a camp, village, castle, or even a whole city. Remember, NA in the wilderness is x5!

In a dungeon, the lair can be one or more rooms of a larger dungeon. If the dungeon is a small one, the lair can occupy all of it, causing "lair" to be the same as "dungeon". Or does it?

What is a dungeon?

Hey this sounds like the dumbest question. We've been playing dungeons & dragons for decades, we don't need to define what a dungeon is. 

Of course! What I'm doing here is answering the question only with information from the OSE rules, because this will help us understand the difference with lairs.

Again, the rules don't give us a definition of what is a dungeon, but the OSE srd has a whole big Designing a Dungeon page, so my take is: whatever we can infer from that page, gives the "nature" of a dungeon.

The page tells us a dungeon can be a variety of different places (section 1), it has monsters (section 2), you should map it (section 3), and you should stock it with the following "important details" (section 4):

Important details: Monsters (including the possibility of patrols in the area), traps, tricks, treasures, or special magical effects that are present should be noted.

Section 4 continues with the notion that a dungeon often extend over multiple levels, and the deeper you go the higher the risks and the reward, and then notes that treasure is usually guarded by monsters, but can occasionally be found unguarded.

After that, the final section is the Random Room Stocking section. In my mind, this is not just a tool to randomly fill the blanks, but also a set of implicit guidelines. That simple table tells me that a dungeon "as intended" is supposed to roughly have:

33% "empty" rooms (i.e. no monsters and no traps, and about 16% of such empty rooms should contain treasure)

33% rooms with some monsters (and about 50% of such monster rooms should contain treasure)

16% rooms with a trap (and about 33% of such trap rooms should contain treasure)

16% "special" rooms.

These proportions match the intent of "risk goes hand to hand with reward".

In a hypothetical 36 room dungeon, these proportions give us:

10 "empty" rooms (i.e. no monsters, no traps, no treasure)

2 "empty" rooms with unguarded treasure (no monsters and no traps!)

6 rooms with monsters

6 rooms with monsters and treasure

4 rooms with some kind of trap

2 rooms with some kind of trap and some treasure

6 "special" rooms.

This is not all, however, because another important bit about dungeons is found in the Dungeon Encounters page: dungeons are expected to include wandering monsters!

Can we figure out a definition from all of that? Let's try:

A dungeon is a place that: is populated by monsters; features traps (or other environmental hazards); has treasure that make it worth exploring; has bizarre, magical things going on, good and bad (the "special" rooms), and monsters roaming around. 

Are lairs and dungeons the same thing?

Short answer: No, obviously.

Longer answer:

A dungeon can host anywhere from zero to dozens of lairs. If the dungeon hosts 1 lair of monsters, we can say that the dungeon is a lair.

We can look at it the other way around and say that a lair can be a dungeon if it has all the features that a dungeon requires: monsters and treasure, and also empty rooms, traps, and special rooms. In other words: it has to be fully fledged, exciting adventure site!

Let's make some comparative examples with Fire Giants:

• You can have a Fire Giants lair inside a larger dungeon, with the following numbers: 1d3 individuals, with a type E treasure hoard + 5,000gp.

• You can have a Fire Giants lair in the wilderness. The description tells us that it should be a black castle near a volcano, with 1d3 x5 individuals, the same type E treasure hoard + 5,000gp, and also the "guardian" creatures listed in the description; 1d3 hydras or 3d6 hellhounds.

The wilderness lair has a lot more giants, but has the same potential treasure as the dungeon lair. How is this fair?

This is supposed to be fair because:

• The wilderness lair is supposed to be all there is to it, i.e. it is supposed to NOT include traps and wandering monsters.
• The dungeon lair is supposed to be part of a dungeon with all the "dungeon stuff": traps, special rooms, and wandering monsters. All of that should compensate for the reduced amount of giants.

Can we have another example?

Sure, let's go on with the hypothetical 36 room dungeon:

6 rooms with monsters + 6 rooms with monsters and treasure

It really is up to you to decide how many monster you put into these 12 rooms.

It IS up to you because the BX flavor of d&d does not include a "% in lair" for monster entries, which is featured in the AD&D books and bestiaries.

So you can decide to have zero lairs! Just a bunch of monsters, with some treasure of your choice.

You can decide to have the twelve rooms as a single goblin lair, and this means you'll spread the total number of goblins, and their king and bodyguards, among these 12 rooms, and spread their hoard among 6 rooms.

Or you can decide to have 6 lairs of different creature groups, each controlling 2 rooms. This will give you a much more crowded and dangerous dungeon, but also more potential loot.

4 rooms with some kind of trap

The guidance for traps is sorely short and only amounts to the six examples in the Example Room Traps section.

2 rooms with some kind of trap and some treasure

The guidance for traps is sorely short and only amounts to the six examples in the Example Treasure Traps section.

How much treasure here? The answer is in the Treasure in Empty / Trapped Rooms section, and depends on dungeon level.

11 "empty" rooms.

These have no monsters, no traps, no treasure, so you "stock" them with whatever makes sense for the type of place the dungeon is.

1 "empty" room with treasure.

No monsters and no traps! How much treasure? The answer is in the Treasure in Empty / Trapped Rooms section, and depends on dungeon level.

6 "special" rooms.

The guidance for special rooms amounts to the 9 examples listed in the Example Specials section.

(The truth is, for actual guidance about traps, "empty" and "special" rooms, you should probably check Courtney Campbell's Artifices, Deceptions and Dilemmas).

Does all of this matter?

No, probably! I mean, considering the gm is supposed to roll the dice to determine how much treasure (if any!) can be found in each lair, we can safely say all of this is just guidelines to stock your dungeons.

Not to mention this post is probably the nerdiest thing I've written in my own life. I feel comforted by the fact that if you are reading this, you are at least as much of a nerd as me.

All of this matters a lot if you care for the implied setting and "balance", and if you want to know how much treasure and how many monsters you are supposed to put into your dungeons and wilderness locales.

Even if you don't roll the dice and end up choosing exactly how many goblins and gold pieces you stock your dungeon with, I think it's just nice to know what the expected numbers are, you know, so we try to be all on the same page.

Because those numbers, and the treasure/HD ratio, is the only attempt BX has to make things "fair" and less "whatever the GM thinks".

Especially if you want to write a dungeon module for publishing, I guess.

Want Cthulhu? Stay Away from Cthulhu

A couple days ago a friend of mine recalled a conversation we had in the '10s or something, about how, if you want to run a game of lovecraftian horror, you should stay away from Lovecraft.

The idea is not original, and probably came from some blog that we read at the time. Let me expand on that.

Running a horror campaign (whatever ruleset you use) with Deep Ones, Mi-Go, Shoggoths, and the other canonical creatures and gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, is not going to make your players experience lovecraftian horror at all. All those entities have become pop culture icons, so widely known and, in the nerdsphere collective imagination, they are domesticated to the point of becoming the subjects for plushies, funkopops, cool t-shirts, mugs, political satire ("Vote Cthulhu"), board games and comical stories.

They are, quite literally, a comfort zone, which is quite literally the opposite of lovecraftian horror. 

If you achieve to have your players experience even just a bit of lovecraftian horror with such set pieces, you probably are a great GM running a great scenario.

The point is, the canonical pieces of the Cthulhu Mythos can't surprise. Cosmic dread, madness, and the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible is gone.

The only way to truly make an attempt is to create your own Mythos. Your unique creatures, entities, gods, and books. Or even better, no creatures, gods and books at all. Go for unprecedented, or at least less abused, categories. One of the points of lovecraftian horror should be: facing something that can't be fully understood, and being able to categorize it is a big step towards understanding... The other points should be: something that threatens you, and that the more you understand it, the more it questions your understanding of reality itself.

I know, it sounds daunting! Even if what you come up with is a half-botched attempt, it still has much better chances of disturbing your players' imagination a little bit.

And potentially, there's more. If you propose your group to play Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, Tiny Cthulhu, The Cthulhu Hack, Realms of Cthulhu, Cthulhu in Space, Cyber-Cthulhu (and the list could go on and on AND ON), well, you've already lost them. You are already telling them "We are going to play a game with the cliche of cosmic dread, madness, and the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible, so play along".

And they might. I mean it will be a game of lovecraftian horror, except the horror.

What to do in order to pull it? In theory, the best way would be to let that horror seep into something else, just like it crawled into the lives of Lovecraft's protagonists without a warning. Let those themes (and your own cosmic Mythos) creep into another game. In theory, the further away the starting setting is from lovecraftian horror, the more impactful it becomes.

That's what they did with True Detective season 1 or, to a lesser degree, with Archive 81,  or Annihilation.

But is that ok, ultimately, with RPGs? There is a final, and not trivial, conundrum.

In my opinion, players should not be sold an epic fantasy campaign, only to see it slowly become a horror campaign. Not fair at all. They signed in for A, not for B. They might hate it, and lose trust in you as a GM. The campaign might feature themes and topics some people don't want to see in a game: body horror, mental illness, religions, you name it. Not fair at all to have those things dropped on players who expected to play college drama, space opera, western action, or whatever.

So what? Probably, the best way is to inject lovecraftian horror into games that already are supposed to be horror, but belong into very different horror niches. Zombie apocalypse games. Vampires. Gothic horror. Heck, even most Sword & Sorcery rpgs might do. You'll avoid pulling a very bad trick to your players, but may still have a chance to go lovecraftian. An Apocalypse World game starting with zombies and slowly turning cosmic horror sounds like a great campaign to me.

So am I saying all those Cthulhu-branded games are worthless?

Naaa. They are fine, good games in their own way. Just know that horror, the way Lovecraft tried to convey it, will hardly be part of your campaign. You're still in for a lot of fun, with so many great adventures and campaigns available.

I'm absolutely in favor of playing within one's comfort zone. I even enjoy vanilla fantasy and will probably write a post about its merits soon!

I think most of the times gamers just want to have fun, not to experience negative emotions such as actual fear, inquietude, uneasiness, doubt. Let alone questioning their understanding of life! Sometimes it's fun to just blast your shotgun into a Deep One's face, and send the inhuman temple into orbit via dynamite... or end up squished to bits or locked at the asylum for trying.

About Dying in Old-School Essentials and Other Old-School Rulesets

Like my other post about encounter balance, this article takes Old-School Essentials for reference, but can be applied to most retro-clones.

The standard rules of most OSR systems simply have characters die at 0 hp.

Many players and GMs feel that's too harsh, especially if you actually roll your class hit die to determine hit points at level 1, meaning you may very well start with 1 or 2 hit points.

That's as bad as it sounds, one hit and you're down... and yet it's very much in line with one failed save and you're dead, which is a constant threat (poison snakes, death spell, pietrification, and so on) even when you have enough hp to take a dozen arrows.

Adhering 100% to those rules is much less harsh if you use Retainers and/or each player plays two or three characters. After all, Old-School Essentials explicitly states it's designed for 6-8 characters, not 3-4. This is the best solution the book has to offer, and if you want to stay within the boundaries of the rules and experience the original gameplay, I suggest you try this route first. This probably is, by the way, where the DCC RPG four-characters-per-player funnel adventures originate from.

But most players prefer to play one character. I get it.

In my DMing career, I've often tweaked death and dying one way or another. Here's a few systems I've tried, plus some I've read around and liked, or not liked, presented to you in small modular bits. 

Maximum HP at level 1. That's probably the most common house rule! It has a large impact on character survivability for level 1-3, then evens out at higher levels. Simple, zero book-keeping involved, nothing to remember while playing.

"Roll the body" Save. When you reach 0 hp, you drop down and you might be dead. You make a final Save versus Death when (if) someone checks on you. You pass it, you're back on your feet with 1 hp and still have a chance to make it back from the dungeon. This type of rule can be found, for example, in Dungeon Crawl Classics. If you're left there, you're dead, eaten by monsters or just bled out. This is highly dramatic for sure! Allows for glorious TPKs where no one is there to check on fallen heroes, and works as a high tension final parachute. Because of Saves progression, higher level characters have better and better chances of avoiding Death's door at the very last minute. Starting characters, not so much. Also, some classes definitely have an advantage with this. I'm looking at you, dwarves. Anyway! This requires no book-keeping. The only thing you have to remember is "hey please check on me!" when you go down. A simpler variation is just immediately Save versus Death to, well, Cheat Death as soon as you hit 0 hp.

Negative HPs. As soon as your HPs reach zero or lower, you're "dying", or "bleeding out". You're out of combat, and might die unless helped. Negative HPs have been around since forever, often together with max hp at level 1. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has them. The big difference in implementation is what happens when you're out of HPs. In most cases, you have a maximum amount of negative HPs, which might be fixed (-10, for example, or half your Constitution score). Actual death can happen as a Save versus Death every round to avoid bleeding out until someone tends to your wounds. Nasty GMs might ask you to apply your negative HPs as a modifier to your Save roll, which scales well with higher level characters and their improved saves. Sometimes bleeding out is translated as suffering 1 hp of damage every round, until you hit -10 or another threshold, which means you're finally dead.
I completely, irrationally hate negative HPs. Anyway. You have a little extra book-keeping. Saving every round (or suffering -1 hp per round until -10) works as a clock for other players, forcing them to decide if they want to spend a round to try and save your life somehow.

Or, you know, just leave those HPs the way they are, and try something different if you're determined to increase survivability. Like...

Shields Shall Be Splintered. One of the most popular OSR house rules of all times. You sacrifice your shield and completely avoid damage from one blow. This simple rule originated here in 2008 and has been developed and built upon in many variations, also involving helms and other pieces of gear. If you use this rule, you must decide what happens to magic shields... and probably enforce a "can't carry more than one shield" rule. This rule leaves non-shield-using classes the way they are, though.

A possible variant: anything you are holding in your hands may save you from one blow and is destroyed in the process, but you must succeed in a roll (a Save versus Death, of course) to pull such a feat. Sounds silly? Think how many swords +1, wands, and holy symbols are going to get broken...

Injury/Death and Dismemberment Tables. Another OSR staple. When at 0 hp, instead of dropping down dead, you roll on a table and see what's happened. Sometimes you lose an eye or ear, some time a finger, toe, or limb. Some time you suffer no effect at all, or lose a point of Constitution or other score, and some time you're crushed to bits, adieu. Conceptually, this adds layers of intermediate results to the binary outcome of th Roll the Body/Cheat Death final Save. This post lists so many examples you may check to pick your favorite table or to create your own. Using such tables increases survivability, and may lead to character retirement! Which can be a nice outcome, for a change. Players must keep in mind that losing their sword arm was the alternative to losing their character altogether...

Also keep in mind that you can decide to have injuries and lost stat points to be permanent or temporary. Temporary effects may be recovered in a given amount of time (weeks for example), while the permanent ones may still be recovered with some magic effect: custom spells, rituals, or the obvious Wish solution.

About Random Treasure in Old-School Essentials and Other Retro-Clones

 Like other posts, this article takes takes Old-School Essentials for reference, but can be applied to most retro-clones.

Random treasure generation is a staple of most early editions of D&D. Big emphasis on random! Those tables may as well create non-existent hoards or, at the other end of the spectrum, mountains of gold and jewels and magic items all in the same place.

The mechanical procedures for random treasure generation are really awful and long, and it is much better to use an online generator such as the one Necrotic Gnome offers on their site.

To some, that's a great feature, to others less so. A lot depends on your play-style, especially on how fast you game goes. If the group discovers a treasure hoard every three sessions, and it's 100 copper pieces because that's what you rolled, that's one thing; if in three sessions they put their hands on say, nine randomly rolled hoards, then things even out much better.

For Referees who don't like random (or too much random), the Old-School Essentials book lists average values for each treasure type, a simple feature which I had never found in other books and one that really helps as a starting point if you want to manually determine/adjust treasure.

Consequences of Random

Random treasure adds another level of thrill to the game, one that is definitely not there if you always go with the average treasure value! On a psychological level it may probably generate the same kind of addiction of instant lotteries: a lesson action RPG video games such as Diablo have learnt well.

A randomly rolled poor hoard is a disappointment for the players, true, and definitely, quite literally, adds nothing to the game, except a lesson learnt: if you want treasure, you should follow rumors about treasure, not rush into every goblin lair on the map.

At the other hand, a superb roll may mean two things: fast forward advancement for the PCs, and probably the introduction of some crazy magic item you wouldn't have put in there if you had manually chosen the treasure. Which is an awesome thing! It has a chance to inject the campaign with freshness and take the emergent story into wild new directions.

Even if you use the average value, adjusting it with a fast roll will still make things more thrilling. Something like roll a d6, if it's even the treasure is smaller than average, if it's odds it's larger, and a d100 to find out the percentage of the increased/decreased value. The really dramatic roll in those treasure tables is the chance for magic items (and their nature).

A Wider Perspective

Randomly rolled treasure are integral to the "by the book" game experience: the game where you follow all the rules has a chance for you to live the story of the outcast freak with no score above 11 who somehow got a sentient sword and a flying carpet during his second session. The more you exclude random from the game, the less chances it has to surprise and entertain you as a group.

And a Different Take: Random Treasure as a Story Tool

Rolling for treasure should never be done during play: the Referee really needs to know if the goblin king possesses potions or enchanted gear, because he sure is going to use them in battle.

So, rolling treasure and accepting the result can be an awesome starting point in designing your adventure or dungeon.

Zero treasure might mean a lot of things, and all of them can expand your scenario beyond what starting idea. 

Someone more powerful extorted it for protection: a dragon, for example! Or: a more powerful dragon!

Someone cleverer stole it (and poor goblin king might still be unaware of the theft!).

It was all spent to fuel a specific endeavor such as a war, crusade, journey, construction, ritual, peace treaty, or dowry.

In other words: the treasure isn't there because it's somewhere else! And finding out about it and getting there might very well be the party's next adventure.

What about lots of treasure? That might be the sign of a very clever creature. One that is not like the rest of its keen. Your goblin king has a businessman attitude, or powerful allies, or a generous patron, or is more powerful, or has studied magic! Or it might just be a bunch of gobbos who stole from their king and are now on the run. The big question here is: where has that treasure come from? Whose gold was it? What are they going to do about it? Here's a hook for a quest, or the input for adding a second faction of monsters in the scenario.

Magic items further shake things up. It is not just the old "give the gnoll boss the axe +2 you've rolled". The axe +2 is the type of item the gnolls get when you pick treasure manually.  Now consider this: you've just mapped and stocked your run of the mill orc lair. But then, boom, you roll treasure and they get an Elemental Summoning Device, Efreeti Bottle, Horn of Blasting, or Drums of Panic! That's no longer the raid-the-dungeon scenario you were designing: that's a cooler one, where those orcs are up to something bigger, subduing other humanoids and boldly raiding villages with their special toy!

The ogre who put the Helm of Alignment Changing on is now held prisoner by his clan, and might become an ally of the party.

What about a Sentient Sword popping into the kobolds' hoard you've prepared as your very first dungeon? Just remember that Bilbo got the One Ring from a bizarre random encounter while in a cave. Let the thing shape your campaign. Think of how it got there, what's its goal, and let the rest of the campaign surprise you*.

*works better if you have an actual campaign world outlined. I should make a post about that.

About Balanced Encounters in Old-School Essentials

How do you balance encounters? That's a very frequent question from people who try Old-School Essentials or other OSR rulesets and retro-clones coming from more recent RPGs.

A very frequent answer is: you don't. Let players learn when to run.

That's a bit harsh, and not exactly what's in the rules. I took the OSE Rules Tome PDF and checked this stuff for you. The same conclusions may as well apply to most other retro-clones of B/X, BECMI, OD&D and similar early editions, but I'm tackling this with the Old-School Essentials pdf at hand.

Let's go.

As far as the written rules go, this is how it is:

1. The game assumes a group of 6-8 PCs.

That's explicit at page 100 in the Classic Fantasy Rules Tome. Note it also recommends a variety of all classes in the group. A party of 8 without a cleric will have a harder time against the undead, for example.

2. The PCs are supposed to venture into a "dungeon level" equal to their character level (average), if they want a "balanced" adventure. Nevertheless, a level 1 party is absolutely welcome to venture into dungeon level 2, if they want to increase both risk and reward.

3. The Dungeon Encounters tables in the book are based on 1. and 2., and tell you what the group might/should encounter. It is roughly based on HDs (creatures for dungeon level 1 roughly have 1 HD, and so on). Page 139 and 204. Also note this is engrained in the dungeon creation system, page 225, which connects dungeon level with both monster encounters and treasure found.

So there’s that for "balance"!

As you can see, given the wild variance in the roll for the number of monsters encountered, the game doesn't assume fair fights at all! Some will be very easy, some will be a bloodbath.

In the wider OSR scene, this has been described as combat as war, in contrast with the combat as sport that you get in more "balanced" games (from d&d 3.x on, with a refined Challenge Raring system).

Combat as war means it can be deadly, and you can and should avoid it when it's too dangerous, and use all you can to your advantage (terrain, scouting, setting up traps and ambushes, using oil, etc).

So how are PCs supposed to survive this game?

1. Reaction rolls.

2. Morale rolls.

3. Information & consequent player agency.

They may make the difference between a memorable campaign and a frustrating streak of TPKs (which might be memorable too).

Reaction rolls are awesome.

Seriously. Strange alliances in the dungeon are a lot of fun, a great opportunity for role-playing (how do you befriend Gnolls? And a Manticore?) And a Wight?), and introduce a whole new level of strategy to the game. With the exception of (most) constructs and undead, creatures prefer to live, and should only engage in combat when they believe they can and will win, or they feel they have no other choice (and so should players). Even when they believe they can win, monsters may prefer to make pacts and/or try to fool or intimidate the adventurers into doing something for them.

Reaction rolls should also be made (and adapted) for non-sentient beasts such as lions, giant spiders and the ever-threatening, save-or-die venomous snakes. They too want to live, and it is hard to believe they attack everything that comes into sight.

Morale rolls are awesome AND necessary.

They are the only way a 1st level group survives repeated encounters with 4d4 kobolds or 1d10 giant shrews. Copy-pasting from previous paragraph: With the exception of (most) constructs and undead, creatures prefer to live, and should only engage in combat when they believe they can win, or they feel they have no other choice (and so should players). Morale rolls are there to reassess the situation once combat has begun and blood has been spilt.

Information makes the game engaging.

This is not in the rules, but is part of the shared wisdom of the OSR. Adventures, scenarios and sandboxes should always include rumors and clues to inform players about what to expect. Maybe not everything, but definitely some of the threats of your Crypt of Damnation should be known or knowable before getting in there, and some other clues about threats might be available once inside, for smart players, before they run into those threats. Footprints, corpses, that kind of things. The end result should be: allowing players to pick their fights. Again, not all of them, but most.

What if I have 3-4 players?

You can:

1. Allow each player to play two characters (hey, even three would be ok!). A game that's as simple as OSE really allows this without much trouble. Plus, if one of your PCs dies, the adventure goes on and you don't have to roll a new character to join the game again! This is the best option, in my view.

2. Use Retainers rules, page 126. That's almost the same as 1. above, you know? To some players it might make a lot of difference, though.

3. Change the number of monsters encountered proportionately, of course. 3-4 PCs means you halve the number of monsters. If you do that, though, you should cut treasure by the same amount! That's if you want to stay true to the "game balance", which connects players' level,  risk and reward.

Final Note: Do What You Want

Everything written in this post is how things are in the book. I'm not saying you HAVE to do it like this. I don't always play like this! I'm just saying these are the answers found in the book, and I suggest you give it try before changing things.

About M. R. James's Ghost Stories, and Investigation RPGs

 I'm stuck home with a cold, and I've been reading an old book I found in my library, probably belonging to a friend who left me a several boxes of books about eight years ago, as he hurriedly left town to pursue a career opportunity in Denmark.*

It's a collection of M. R. James's ghost stories, which I had never read before (I know, shame on me!).

Mine is a cheap edition and probably not the best translation around (or at least I hope there's a better one!), but still decent for a few evenings' entertainment. It also gets (dubious) bonus points for being yellowed, old and stinky, like the ancient manuscripts featured in most of its stories...

I'm finding the stories quite enjoyable, and a perfect match for the early autumn weather.

I'm also finding they are very good for reaping ideas for certain types of horror RPGs!

Eldritch Tales is one of many intriguing alternatives to the obvious Call of Cthulhu...

Each story has a mystery going on, and such mystery involves a cursed object, manuscript, book, piece of furniture, architectural element, etc, and the background of the thing is discovered by the protagonists by investigating ancient libraries, diaries, letters, archives and local superstitions. In most cases, the protagonists are professors, antiquarians, scholars who discover (and occasionally re-awaken!) horrors that took place one or two centuries before. Does that sound familiar?

Several stories even include some kind of puzzle (the most famous probably is the FUR FLA FLE BIS latin gimmick on a templars' dogwhistle) ready to be stolen by GMs.

What got me thinking they could be good inspiration for horror RPGs is that the stories are simple. To the point that they occasionally are too simple to really be an interesting read.

But playing horror/investigation RPGs for years has taught me something: you don't need complex mysteries, you need simple ones. Your players aren't detectives, they are just your players!

Two pieces of advice for horror GMs I read years ago have stuck in my head (I'm sorry to say I have no idea who should be credited). EDIT: a reader pointed me to the source of the following "rule of three", this post from The Alexandrian blog.

The first is the rule of three: prepare three different ways for the players to find a clue. They are not detectives, they are probably going to miss one, and misinterpret another. Having a third one should be enough... So for example if the players should investigate the missing person's uncle, you should have his name pop up into three different ways, not just one.

The second advice is, well, good for when even the rule of three fails! If players are stuck and don't know how to proceed with their investigation, that's the time for the bad guys (or the supernatural thing) to strike... and leave a new clue behind. To continue the example: they missed uncle Bob? The next day, he's on the news as he's disappeared too, in similar circumstances!

Both these tricks seem to be at work for M. R. James's protagonists. They are not detectives themselves. They are just curious people who stumble upon some inexplicable events, and spend some time investigating documents and places and making questions... sometimes to their own demise.

I can certainly recommend James's stories to any horror fan who's never read them, and even more to GMs of horror/investigation games in need of fresh ideas.

Update:

Readers have pointed me to Casting the Runes, a role playing game based on the GUMSHOE engine and "set in the worlds of M. R. James", developed by The Design Mechanism.

It has been successfully funded on Kickstarter and is available for preorder, and a free preview is up on DriveThruRPG!

*I just realized with amusement, rereading the post, that this incipit itself sounds quite Jamesy!

About Character Variety in Savage Worlds

 One topic that now and then surfaces on forums and social media about Savage Worlds is how players end up picking the same Edges (Combat Edges, usually) and developing the same skills... aka "all characters look the same".

In time I've come to think of this as another problem: it's just that "all your adventures are the same"!

Players develop their character to adapt to the situations that emerge in play, session after session. If they only have ONE meaningful, relevant Social Conflict every six sessions, no player is going to go beyond Persuasion d8. If you always set up four combats per session, everyone will end up picking Quick, Block, Dodge, etc... and so you would, too!

This is not thoroughly bad, mind you. It simply makes sense that most the heroes of a Veteran posse in Deadlands pick the Brave Edge: they've been facing (and hopefully defeating) all kinds of horrors! Same in a Weird Wars campaign, with the Quick Edge: be quick or be dead, you know.

If you as a GM want to see variety in player characters "builds", you must offer variety in adventure situations! Investing in a "face" type of hero requires a return for the advances spent there. Let those count, make sure your adventures include meaningful social interactions.

Meaningful means those situations and rolls truly affect the story in a major way. A Social Conflict to win Allies can turn an impossible fight into an easy victory, for example.

The same is true for all non-combat skills and linked Edges. Leadership Edges are only good if characters get Allies. Survival, Repair, Occult, Academics, Piloting, and related Edges, are only good and will be picked after character creation only if they play a reasonably important and frequent part in your games!

Because it really boils down to effectiveness. As a player, I know that Combat Edges and skills may make a difference between life and death. If, after a few sessions, I feel that Charismatic, Scholar, Woodsman won't make a dramatic impact on my adventures, changing the course of events for the better, I'll keep stacking Combat Edge upon Combat Edge.

Some campaigns are heavily focused on combat, and that's ok. Maybe player characters are soldiers, or monster hunters, etc. If you want to preserve character variety, several approaches might be tried.

You may put limits. A maximum of one Combat Edge during character creation, and/or a maximum of two Combat Edges per Rank.

Or you may put incentives into developing different features. During Advances, players might be allowed to gain twice the benefits of each advance if they don't pick Combat Edges and/or attacking skills: gaining two Edges, or four skill points, or one Edge and two skill points.

Both courses of action are not great, frankly. Adding limits to players' choices is always bad. And having characters gaining the equivalent of two Advances at once might create some really bizarre situations.

In short, even in a military or combat-heavy campaign I would still suggest to put as many non combat situations as reasonably possible!

Many Savage Worlds setting books include adventure generators. Some outline the goal, villains, and complications of a scenario; others, like the one in Saga of the Goblin Horde, explicitly refer to game systems (Chases, Dramatic Tasks, Social Conflicts, etc) to be used for each scene or situation.