Dungeons Deep

It is known that all the real news for Talisman Adventures RPG hits the steam-powered presses of  Talisman Island first. Your humble Thaumaturgerer cannot compete with the industrious gnomes who scour and glean the beaches of The Island to find every last scrap or bottled message that washes up thence from the Maelstrom. Also, spot the obvious and very clear publicly-available announcements that completely pass over my befuddled head. 

Anyhoo, the latest scoop is that nestled in the back pages of the Free RPG Day release "Curse of the Rat Queen" is an exciting glimpse of the first sourcebook for Talisman Adventures: "Tales of the Dungeon". There is an image of Fresh New Art (! Adventurers approaching a Dark Fiend seated on a Throne of White Energy) and some text outlining the contents. See above.

Lead designer Ian Lemke has elsewhere mentioned in interview that the intention is to release a series of "Tales of..." sourcebooks for the game. The natural conclusion is that these sourcebooks will mirror the Corner Board expansions for the board game ("...the City" has been mentioned and one assumes "...the Forest" and "...the Highlands" might follow). If only from a marketing standpoint, this seems to be a Good Idea.

I am impatiently excited to see how dungeons (indeed how The Dungeon) will be handled. Idle speculation follows:

Looking at the boardgame, the original 2nd Edition Dungeon appeared to be intended as a vast region beneath The Realm of the whole board, such that exploring it might take the adventurer anywhere in the land (indeed, straight to the Crown of Command on rolling a 6). In the 3rd and 4th Editions of the game, the Dungeon is bigger in game terms (with more spaces and many more possible encounters), but located off towards the ruins - and although defeating the Dungeon Lord can also land the hero on the CoC, this is clearly as the result of passing through a magical portal rather than actually emerging through a trapdoor.

The game in all editions has other dungeons - the Mines and the Crypts in the Inner Region - each of which we might assume to be of epic though entirely abstracted-away proportions. Notably, they also have exits to all corners of the land (though not direct to CoC).

There are also the Cave and Crypt encounter cards, where gold, dragons, demons and Lost Turns lurk. Mini-dungeons if you will - also, given the potential enemies within, themselves epic though in an entirely concentrated form.

Back to the RPG. I have previously noted that none of the so-far published adventures uses a map of anything except the occasional encounter location. Toads & Diamonds is the only adventure to feature a dungeon - again, there is no map, but the physical relation of locations to each other is described (ie, what exits there are from each location and where they lead). 

So, will "Tales of the Dungeon" include maps?

I love maps, especially dungeon maps - who doesn't? They are incredibly useful to help the GM to describe locations, which allow the players to picture, and make decisions, drawing maps themselves, exploring and getting deeper into a "real" Other World. But there are significant drawbacks. Dungeons are Old Skool Fun, but they are hardly fresh, new experiences, and maybe it is hard to avoid concluding that pretty much since at least Doom and Tomb Raider, computers might do them better now. 

A map can constrain action as much as it provides a solid framework - limit imagination, and force attention to nit-picky, draughtspersonly considerations. Did Tolkien describe every foot and inch and the location of each door, direction of each corridor in Moria? Or did he conjure a vast underground realm, of haunting deeps and colossal scale, not by covering every corner and detail but by giving a sense of its physicality and 'reality', but allowing the story to sweep along, describing the locations where the action occurs, and blurring over the connecting  stretches.

Talisman Adventures is particularly well-suited to the latter approach, through the use of its Exploration roles - the Guide and Watcher tests. These are especially well-suited to Dungeons that are at an epic, Moria-like scale. I've written about using the Exploration Roles in Dungeoneering previously, with reference to the caves in the Princess and the Goblin. I've decided to try and put it into practice for reals, and am now working up an adventure that will be a foray into The Dungeon on a rescue mission. I will be leaning heavily on Moria to try and get the effect I am after, and will be sure to report how effective (or otherwise) this proves to be in actual play.

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Last Warning: Talisman Adventures RPG at Dragonmeet, Novotel Hammersmith, London. Saturday 4th December 10am - 2pm, in wherever the Demo Hall is. I am there to Talk Talisman & Toadings, answer questions about the RPG - and give punters a chance to try out the system (quite possibly by taking a Delve into the Dreaded Dungeon...).