How awesome would it be to have a collaboration with Bandit's Keep, Questing Beast, Runehammer, and Gavin Norman from OSE. Twitter powers must connect these scholars of the OSR!!
I would use a piece of the jewelry as a hook. Take a cue from Lovecraft and make it unusual in design and shaped to fit an inhuman physique. The patron, map seller, or mine owner has a piece to show them. And the PCs are hired to recover more. Or they find a piece on a dead miner. The jewelry can have a snake god motif it could even be that they use it as offerings to their god. When you rolled 3000 silver i thought silver statuette weighing 3000 coins. Value 300 gold or because of artistic value 2 or 3 times that. I use the total treasure rolled as a baseline for the value of everything. If the silver statue is worth more, then reduce the number or value of another category.
Right off the bat, what that sounds an awful lot like is The Lost City. That module involves a lost people who have degenerated not so much physically but societally, having become literal degenerates and there is even a destroy an ancient evil as they have fallen in with an old god.
@@BanditsKeep I got into collecting the older adventures late. I actually bought Goodman Games version of it. Has the complete original and a 5e version. It also fills in the areas of the city left for the DM, which is really cool. I don't play 5e, but it's easy to convert that stuff.
Dwellers of the Forbidden City, too, although it’s a 1e ADnD module. It had Mongrelmen (interbred and degenerated over centuries/ millennia) and the original snake people, Yuan Ti.
The best thing about Gems and Jewelry is finding tables to generate the pieces, descriptions etc and see the players decide to wear it rather than sell it
In some OSR games they get xp for securing treasure, not necessarily selling it. They usually prefer cash right away unless they think the objects could be magical or if it's something really fancy. Adventurers can end up walking around with a bag of gems as portable wealth instead of several porters or wagons carrying locked chests. We have found art objects and decided to deck out our embassy with them. A dancing golem, an LP player, some kind of lava lamp show etc. Things that are truly unique.
If you ever think it’s too much treasure, then I recommend increasing the challenge, e.g. with (more) puzzles and traps, difficulties of finding or getting some of the treasure (e.g. near the yellow mold, or in water, like you mentioned, in a room behind a secret door, etc.). Perhaps some of the miners are still alive, and getting them out alive is difficult. However, if freed, they can help the adventurers fight the snake people.
The challenge in lairs is the staggering amount of encounters. If they start a fight and get unlucky, they could get swamped by dozens of 2HD snake men. But it also means these guys have time to build permanent defences against invaders and other dungeon-dwellers. I can think of one source of traps here, or rather two. The current generation of snake men living here and the snake men ancestors. The ancestral traps could be anything at all, they could even have lost their original purpouse. The snake men have just learned and passed down small tricks to get around them. It's a small dungeon so there's not a lot of space for empty rooms and trap rooms. And not a lot of things to defend themselves against. It depends if you're a fan of corridor traps. The chamber of the high priest better have some funky stuff in it.
Since you've established that oxygen is less plentiful down there, what might make the snakemen more intimidating without having to tinker with the stats any further is to give them barrel chests and have them breathe heavily.
I love to reskin monsters, add an asterisk or two to their HD for each extra ability I give em and run them. This is why I love old school games, they let you DIY to your hearts content.
In my campaign red glowing mushrooms are eaten by giant firebeetles to give them their glowing glands. Eating them concentrates the nutrients in the glands. The shrooms by themselves only glow a little bit.
A easier way to do the treasure might be to give each troglodyte a silver dagger worth xx. The platinum could be temple trappings like a pitcher and 4 chalices totaling 1,000 platinum pieces. And the gold might be in coin as well as nuggets (it is a mine after all).
Dan, this is really great stuff! OMG you get me so psyched to play!!! Again, lol I don't know what my problem is, your adventure designs are so simple and straight forward but have such a rich feel to them. Mine are just these explosions of ideas and they become so complex, I think fun too?, but these big menageries of all sorts of things that it gives me headaches sometimes. I love how you use the computer to manage things, I am less skilled technologically. BTW I'm sure this is a stupid question, but you use Moldvay basic or Mentzner?
That’s not too much treasure for a Troglodyte lair. Trogs are tough customers, with 3 Hit Dice, chameleon ability, and stench, they can almost certainly surprise and overwhelm most adventuring parties. Add a White Dragon to the mix and a Trog Cleric or shaman, and you may have to beef up the reward. Speaking of Dragons, on p. B34 of the Basic Rulebook (Moldvay ‘81) it mentions that dragons maybe up to 3 HD lower or higher based on their age, so you could use younger versions of other dragon species if you felt that White dragons didn’t work for the setting.
Great video that was actually very helpful and quick. I've been working on making an ancient Lizardmen tribe emerging from a temple in a dense swamp with golden jewelry shaped into an unknown Elder God they "attack" the town but really leave a few idols hidden around town where mostly women would find them. Then they walk into the swamp desperately to find the temple in a trance like state. The players could be some of the townsfolk wake up in a dungeon and have to get out if they can....
Another great video. Loving this stuff. A couple of thoughts. First, I think that all of the snake people ideas would work better if the living areas sections were bigger. This complex seems so small that if there is combat, the entire complex would come out to fight. Like an ant bed or bee hive. If you make those areas bigger, then it makes more sense that more snake men would join the fight in the temple a bit more slowly. Second, I like the jewelry on the temple as a lure, but I kind of like your original idea of having the snake people wearing it. But, maybe have it so covered in junk that it is not obvious that it is so valuable. Have the characters find some of this jewelry, but not realize its worth until later.
Just a few days ago I was searching RU-vid for advice on giving treasure. There is a lot about magic items as treasure, but not guidelines to how exactly generating treasure works. So thanks a lot! You could honestly make another video which was just the treasure generation part. Now I know you said that what you rolled was a lot of treasure, but even the lower end of those intervals seems like a lot to me, coming from a 5e viewpoint. Has treasure amount changed a lot or am I just a bit too afraid of giving gold?
In these older games where treasure is XP there needs to be WAY more treasure than 5e - look at the average amount of XP to hit the next level and a single session dungeon should have 1/4 to 1/3 that. So if a party needs 12000 xp you’d want 3-4000gp in a dungeon that can be played in a single session (on the low end)
@@BanditsKeep thanks for the answer! I'm currently running a modified version of Against the cult of the reptile God, and I kept thinking "wow these peseants are rich, not to mention the church." but it makes sence given what you explained. I still like the way you generated the treasure and I might experiment with yhay and just divide the end result by a factor to scale the amount to an appropriate level.
With all those riches, maybe some of it comes from the vein that the miners were mining and/or from the miners themselves. E.g. maybe it was a gem mine.
Large groups like a whole tribe or lair often have a big heap of treasure as a whole. But each troglodyte wearing jewelry? Yikes, this would be the most blinged-out dungeon tribe I have seen. More than half the snake-men in each encounter would have a funky golden hat or cool bracelet. That sounds a bit more interesting than dumping it all with the big snake and the high priest. Or the leader of a full snake man group, with max hp or an extra hd, wears several pieces. A snake priest needs a big ol' golden feathered hat. I'm sometimes lazy and roll the value of gems and jewelry as they find it. I know there are ten gems in a box but exactly which gems can be determined later.
@@BanditsKeep Now I'm curious what some adventuring fools will do when they see the first four 2HD troglodyte guards at the entrance and realize they have at least 2000 in jewelry among them.
I note in previous videos you adjusted treasure according to the numbers of monsters appearing in the lair. After rolling for the numbers of monsters, if only half populate the lair, you reduced the treasure by half. Is this RAW? I always tried to use the average amount of a Treasure Type if I rolled an average number appearing. If number appearing is maxed, I double the average treasure.
