Every once in a while, a single TTRPG session becomes infamous within a gaming group. This session becomes the root of inside jokes, memes, and is retold both at and away from the gaming table. For my gaming group, our most “infamous” session was when we played through DCC #89: Chaos Rising – “Elzemon and the Blood-Drinking Box.” In this blog post, I’ll give a summary of the module and pull apart its lasting power in our imaginations. Hopefully we can glean what went right, what went (SO) wrong, and how we might be able to replicate certain feelings in future sessions. Spoilers ahead!

The Set-Up

I love a randomly generated magic item. My brother, who mainly plays a half-orc fighter, found some sweet magic plate armor in a dungeon crypt. Bonus AC, fire invulnerability, and… each time he entered combat a Gnoll spirit would goad him into a blind rage. He had to make a DC 12 WIS save or begin attacking the closest creature to him, be it friend or foe. Being the strongest fighter of our entire open-table roster, and having a -1 WIS, this completely changed the way my players approached combat whenever my brother’s fighter was present. Naturally, he was itching to get his armor de-cursed ASAP. Enter Rhalabast: Arch Wizard of the Arcane Tower.
Rhalabast explained that he could de-curse this armor, but it was a complicated, resource-intensive task, so he needed my brother to go on a fetch quest as payment. Go to the lair of his wizardly rival, Nekros the Grotesque, steal a magic box (DO NOT OPEN), and bring it back. Also, this box demands fresh Lawful blood every day or else something bad will happen and they’ll fail the mission. Just due to how scheduling a large pool of players works, it took a while before my brother found a willing Lawful character to help him with this quest: and it was a fresh Level 1 fighter. No matter, I thought, as this module is rated for Level 1 characters, and most of the party was around level 4-5 at the time.

Nekros’ Lair: Cave Madness Sets In

After some exposition to find the lair, the adventure properly began. Nekros’ lair is, essentially, a giant toilet drilled miles into the earth. There is a massive (and I mean MASSIVE, more on this in a bit) spiral staircase leading all the way down to a pool of piss and shit. In Shadowdark, Feather Fall is a Level 1 spell, and since I run an open table with a diverse player-base, I knew that this might trivialize getting to bottom of this huge spiral, but that’s OK. Players should use whatever tools they have! There’s also at least one Ring of Feather Fall floating around amongst the players, too. For better or worse, no one decided to bring a Level 1 Wizard or the Ring of Feather Fall. Nevertheless, with a couple of mid-level characters present, I thought things could wrap up quickly. By this point in the campaign, they had plenty of weird magic items that I thought might be able to help. I underestimated, by far, how much this spiral would annoy my players.
See, the lair is so deep that it takes days to reach the bottom by way of the spiral stairs. Each spiral goes on for hundreds of feet, but the angle is so slight that running down the stairs incurs a risk of tripping (and falling and dying). Dungeon Crawl Classics modules can be very verbose in their prose, and I especially loved the way it describes the geometry of the stairs:

And so my players went on, slowly descending the stairs. On the way down, they were accosted by some baddies (huge gross hairless vomit-cats, as per DCC’s trademarked brand of weirdness), which they easily dispatched. Also, a dislocated voice continuously taunted them.
More speed-walking down the huge spiral. Is this getting boring? Wait… if it’s only 150 feet to the next spiral, maybe they could repel down with rope? Good idea, I say, as half the party begins its descent.
I rolled some dice to check for an encounter. Sure enough: more vomit-cats attack. This time, with the party split, the characters are nearly all killed. At the very least, there’s no more vomit-cats left in the dungeon. Unfortunately, my players don’t know this fact, so they decide to play it safe, stick together, and speed walk (but not TOO fast) down the spiral stairs together.
Eventually, I tell them their characters are getting tired. In Shadowdark, sleeping restores all HP and lost abilities, so they are happy to sleep.
Unfortunately for them, the dislocated voice which has been taunting them interrupts their sleep with the sounds of crying babies. WIS save or get no benefits from resting. Most fail.
Everyone is having fun, but their characters are EXHAUSTED. The veil between character and player is thin. At least they will reach the bottom of the pit soon.

Bottom of the Pit: Piss and Shit and No Treasure

Above a lake of yellow acid, a massive guano mound conceals Nekros’ lair. Inside, a complex series of tubes connects the exsanguinated bodies of several captured Lawful priests to a magic box. On cue, when my players entered the area, the final Lawful priest perished, the box having drank the last of his blood. Finally, this is the MacGuffin!
But wait… where’s all the treasure?
There isn’t any, really. Not here, anyway. This lair was built for the express purpose of keeping and feeding this magical box, apparently. The reward, after all, is de-cursing my brother’s pesky armor. They do discover that the dislocated voice is an enslaved minor demon, commanded to guard the lair. They do not find any amazing magical artifacts (remember: this is a Level 1 dungeon!). They got what they came for, though, so it was time to get the heck outta there.

The Way Back Up: True Cave Madness

This is about when what my players have since dubbed “Cave Madness” took over. Thousands of feet underground, no sunlight, no resources, low health, and a magical box. The magical box began to gurgle… it needed to be fed Lawful blood.
How was our single Lawful, level 1 character fairing, after all this?
1 hit point.
How much Lawful blood does the box need per day?
5 hit points.
Luckily, we had a Ranger character present who might be able to make a healing salve which can restore 1 HP. And so my players began killing their Lawful comrade.

Somehow this level 1 survived. Having to continually gamble with a Player Character’s life began to break everyone’s brain.
When it came time to sleep and (hopefully) restore hit points, the dislocated voice once again tried to interrupt everyone’s sleep. This time more characters were able to shrug it off.
Nevertheless, as the day dawned, the box began to gurgle. More stabbing.

The Way Home

Eventually, against all odds, everyone made it out in one piece. Now outside and in the sunlight, my players spied a Lawful priest, captured and paralyzed by demons, brought to feed the box more blood.
Did I mention that this lair was several days’ journey from home?
My players killed the demons and approached the priest. He told them that his monastery was nearby, and that Nekros was keeping an evil artifact hidden in his lair. If the party returns the artifact, they would be rewarded with magic treasure.
Nope, sorry. This magic MacGuffin is already promised to another wizard. They decided to kidnap the priest and bleed him on the journey home. When they returned to town, they fed him a Potion of Forgetfulness. No harm, no foul, right?
Rhalabast, pleased with the MacGuffin, snapped his fingers, instantly lifting the curse on my brother’s armor.
So… it was that easy? Everyone was pissed.
This session was aggravating in many ways, and not every session should be like this. There is a very fine line between annoying the players and annoying the characters. When that needle is threaded, however, the session can become legendary. We played this session nearly a year ago, but still reference it frequently, if not fondly.
Many months later, some players decided to visit that Lawful temple, which apparently housed magic items. They sacked the temple, killed countless Lawful priests, and stole the treasure.

I have been playing a LOT of TTRPGs recently, and I’ve got some thoughts! My main game right now is Shadowdark, which I play as an open-table style game (click the link to learn more about how it’s set up).
The TL;DR is I kind of run an in-person, offline MMORPG in my living room. Once or twice a week, ~3-6 players (out of a pool of ~40!) come to my house and explore dungeons in a “living” world episodically. Some players have a stable of different characters ready to play, so if (for example) there’s a rumor about a vampire lord, they might want to bring a party of Clerics to deal with him. Other players will only focus on their “main,” and get a single character very powerful. We game a lot, both playing homebrew content and published modules, so I hope to use this blog to share my experiences and thoughts.

With the introduction out of the way… DEPTH CRAWLS! As far as I can tell, the idea of a “depth crawl” was created by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen in her excellent books The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library, both available via Soul Muppet Publishing.
Depth crawls are procedurally generated adventures which get weirder and more dangerous the deeper you venture. Exploring a depth crawl means rolling on a Locations table, a Details table, and a Random Events table to generate points of interest. Each turn, players must decide if they should go deeper, remain, or turn back. Going deeper increases the group's “depth” by one point, which adds 1 to the procedural rolls. The tables are organized such that higher numbers have weirder and deadlier results, which, since you are adding your “depth” score to these rolls, means that deeper is usually more dangerous. Since each area is randomly generated, no advanced preparation is needed.

I’ve been using The Stygian Library for several months and it’s amazing! It’s an extra-dimensional, ever changing, infinite library containing all the multiverse’s knowledge. If something was ever written in a book, anywhere, that book exists somewhere within the library. Forbidden or arcane knowledge is, of course, only accessible deep within. My players use this as an in-universe Google search:
Does the big bad have any weaknesses? Where can I find a new magical sword? Any juicy gossip on the town mayor?
Their delves aren’t always successful, but they are entertaining. The library itself also has a meta-plot, but (to many of my players, at least) that is secondary to the utility of being able to find information. The library itself is eerie and liminal: endless rows of shelves broken up by strange locations. The back of the book is also stocked with tons of great tables, including d100 “what book is this?”

I only recently picked up The Gardens of Ynn (this year at PAX Unplugged!) but I’ve already got a chance to run it a few times. Instead of an indoor library, the Gardens are an endless and uncanny gardenscape. Studio Ghibli’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky is an obvious inspiration (and named as such in the foreword), especially the scenes where that ancient, moss-covered robot endlessly patrols the forgotten, ruined castle walls. The Gardens of Ynn is written very evocatively, and my players are itching to return and discover more secrets. A recent session generated an unexpectedly hilarious combination:

There’s a bit of an art in combining these random prompts together, and I decided to really lean into the Zero Gravity aspect this time. The players, seeing the graves, immediately bound towards them and began digging.
First result: Treasure, sweet.
Next result: Angry skeletons. Ugh.
Wait... how does combat work in Zero-G? Well, even accounting for wind resistance, shooting an arrow will still launch you backwards. Grappling an opponent could launch them (or you!) into space. For a few glorious moments, the way everyone thought about combat totally changed. Players and skeletons alike were flying and firing arrows and javelins to try to right themselves. With nearly all skeletons dealt with, they decided to dig up some more graves.
More angry skeletons! Sweet!
Between Shadowdark’s inherently fast combat and my driving the players to make quick decisions, everyone was deeply engaged, despite a spirited argument over whether throwing a baseball in space would actually launch you backwards. A few of my players asked if I could add more Zero-G areas because it made combat so chaotic and, well, different and fun.
Both books have very permissive (Creative Commons) licenses, and the publisher created automatic rollers if you’d like to roll up some locations yourself:

Stygian Library Generator
Gardens of Ynn Generator

Despite the online rollers, I really like to keep things as analog as possible, and I heartily recommend both books. Part of the fun, I think, is asking the players themselves to roll the dice and discover what weird areas lie ahead! They are also written to be system agnostic, with monsters helpfully statted with recognizable terms like "Armor as chainmail," so these modules could fit into many different styles of games.

It’s got me thinking about creating my own depth crawl. One of my favorite episodes of Adventure Time is “Dungeon Train,” where an infinite and randomly generated train has increasingly weird foes in each train car. The show presents the train as totally random and full of combat, but I think I can take inspiration from Cavegirl and create a meta plot with more intentionally placed encounters and set pieces (not all of which are combat, of course). In addition to the regular suspects in a train dungeon (a dining car, sleeper cars, observation car, coal car, engine, etc), the deeper “levels” could get really weird. It’ll take some more fleshing out, but I’ll post it here if I end up writing something!