Survival in Single-Dungeon Campaign

[Greysect]

I am a DM, and after my players' latest adventure is resolved, I will be starting a new campaign that takes place in a single dungeon, beginning as they enter it, ending when they escape. The players will be unable to return to towns to refresh and must either create makeshift safe havens they must defend or fight over shelters established by creatures in the dungeon. Gold is useless, as there are little to no vendors in the dungeon. All items must be fought for.

My first question is how one should distribute food, shelter, and items for PCs without seeming merciful or artificial. Should I give PCs more starting gold than usual for supplies, or let them begin the delve as they always would, with no way to return home and replenish?


My second question is how would one handle skills like Craft(Alchemy) and (Poisonmaking). The PHB states that gold must be spent on reagents to create these items, but there are no stores. One solution I thought of was to hide sources for material components throughout the dungeon.

The players will be living in the dungeon for days, maybe weeks. Are there any special considerations I should take that a DM wouldn't in a dungeon with an exit?

Questions, comments, and suggestions are all appreciated.

[Duke of URL]

Well, as for food, the critters in there have got to eat and drink (unless they're constructs, undead, or the like), and many of them are made out of meat.

Gold is useless, so you may need to be more explicit about what the actual reagents for the various craft skills represent. The players can accumulate "wealth" through these reagents, other raw materials, and spell components/focuses.

Shelter they'll have to make for themselves. Secure an area, post watches, and sleep in shifts. Failure to attend to these details should mean death or other negative consequences (such as all of their gear being stolen).

[valadil]

Do the characters know there's no backing out? Whether or not they know this going in will affect their preparedness.

Do you have any PCs interested in crafting? If not, there's no need for reagents. Don't bother worrying about stuff like this until it comes up.

Food and items can be found on anything else in the dungeon. If they encounter and kill other adventurers, it's perfectly reasonable that those other people would have brought food too.

Shelter is another matter. Make it easy, but don't hand it to them for free. Basically you should let them tell you what sort of shelter they want and then they get it (or something close enough) depending on their survival rolls. If they roll high enough I'd even give a PC the marker and let them draw their own campsite.

[Greysect]

Let's say the encounter and kill a poisonous creature and wish to use both its meat and its poison. Would survival be and appropriate skill both to extract enough poison to refine for their use and take pieces of safe meat? What would your rules be on how long raw poison stays virulent in a dead creature?

The players know that they cannot return for equipment. The players have asked me in previous sessions how they are interested in trap-making, alchemy, and poison-crafting, and would like to add these to their next characters.

As for the party itself, I limited them to Tier 3, and they have chosen Factotum, Duckblade, and Dread Necromancer or Wild-shape Ranger. If none of them tell me outwardly that they will invest points in Survival, should I tell them they should? Survival will make their delve much easier, but it isn't vital, right?

[Duke of URL]

Let's say the encounter and kill a poisonous creature and wish to use both its meat and its poison. Would survival be and appropriate skill both to extract enough poison to refine for their use and take pieces of safe meat? What would your rules be on how long raw poison stays virulent in a dead creature?

Survival would be reasonable there. I'd allow Craft (poison) to apply to the extracting the poison as well (as an alternate option, possibly with synergy bonuses if both are trained well enough).

I think in nature, such poisons tend to lose potency pretty fast. If they don't extract it right away, it probably won't last. If they do extract it into vials, for the sake of simplicity I'd probably assume they had no "expiration date". You want grittiness, but not excessive book-keeping.

[Randel]

Occasionally have the players come across the corpses of other adventurers. Maybe the remains of a rogue who was killed on a trap (close inspection reveals that his magic items and several tools or clothes were taken... closer inspection reveals he was near malnourished and after he died much of his flesh was cut off with a sword or other blade).

Keep going and find the remains of other adventurers who also have much of their more valuable items looted off of them along with arms/legs or other bits of meat missing.

Then at the end find a dead fighter who who is decked out with lots of magic items and has several ration bags full of what might be some kind of dried jerky. Oddly enough, his body wasn't cut up by anyone. There is the burned remains of a journal nearby, a few pages are intentionally spared that give hints about what might be found in this level but the names of these adventurers and what they did in the dungeon was all burned.

I'm sure you can get away with leaving a few things in a dead adventurers possessions, particularly if they are things that the other members of the party might not deem necessary to lug around.

[Gavinfoxx]

Encourage your most crunch competent player to play an Artificer, and flat out tell them, "If the party wants magical items, your character is going to have to make them. I will enable that process, but I'm putting magic item procurement in player hands. Consider that in how you design your artificer." Give stuff that "counts as a certain amount of GP worth of materials for crafting purposes" and "counts as a certain amount of XP toward crafting purposes" as treasure, and let the Artificer make things for the entire party. Start the group at level 3 at least. Be generous in how quickly mundane things can be crafted, by mostly letting mundane crafting of most things take a few days at most. Be generous with bonus feats and feat retraining. Give them a Portable Hole filled with lots of masterwork tools for all sorts of mundane crafting. Be generous with letting like types of crafting work with one another (poison and alchemy together, woodworking and fletching and bowyer together, etc.). Be generous with allowing them to create weird and useful wondrous items, and to combine wondrous items. Be generous with allowing the artificer to create potions of obscure spells, and spells at a lower level than he would otherwise be able to do (woo Cure Moderate Wounds as a level 1 spell, because it IS a level 1 spell for an obscure class in an obscure forgotten realms splatook! imagine that!). Give the party an Eternal Wand of Rope Trick. Allow multiple extradimensional spaces to nest in one another without any particular difficulty. Be generous in allowing characters to combine effects of like slot items with no extra cost (ie, no 1.5). Let the party get through the dungeon at their own pace, but if they want crafting materials, they have to take risks, overcome enemies, solve problems, and go to hard to get to areas. Be generous in giving them things that increase craft checks and skill checks, like give out an eternal wand of Magecraft with the "large amount of masterwork crafting tools in a portable hole" that you give them early on, off of a DEAD Artificer that bit off more than he could chew.

[Duke of URL]

To follow on to the previous, check out the Craft Points variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/craftPoints.htm) from Unearthed Arcana. (However, I recommend changing the rule so that you don't require feats to use craft points for masterwork items... that's just insane.)

Between craft points per level and the bonus craft points for all of the artificer's bonus crafting feats, (s)he will probably be looking at XP as the limiting factor for crafting, not time.

[Greysect]

I'm afraid I don't have the book for artificer, though how would this class work as a surrogate? http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19527714/Inventor_core_class_v._2.0

I could drop a wand or scroll of rope trick somewhere in the dungeon, at least one of the players will have UMD.

Another small question I would put in a separate thread if it weren't so small: how does wildshape progression work for a ranger? Would he get the same X/day and upgrades as the Druid would at the very same levels, medium and small only of course?

[Gavinfoxx]

Artificer is in Eberron Campaign Setting, which is a GREAT book to have in general. Do you think you can pick it up? I don't really like that Inventor class...

Wizards or Archivists could do crafting if they take lots of crafting feats, but they generally need major access to lots of spells, which often requires a place to buy lots of wizard or archivist scrolls to do that crafting... Artificers don't need that..

Wild Shape Ranger:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/variantCharacterClasses.htm#ranger
The ranger would be limited to small and medium ANIMALS only.

[Jergmo]

As for the party itself, I limited them to Tier 3, and they have chosen Factotum, Duckblade, and Dread Necromancer or Wild-shape Ranger. If none of them tell me outwardly that they will invest points in Survival, should I tell them they should? Survival will make their delve much easier, but it isn't vital, right?

I must know which book the Duckblade class is from. :smallamused:

[Gavinfoxx]

Sorry, Artificer is high tier 1, my bad. I didn't realize you were limiting to tier 3. Tell them outright that someone should probably have maxxed survival ranks. The Factotum would do well, because of that daily bonus thing, being, you know, a skill monkey.

[Jergmo]

I promise I'm not trying to make fun of you, but I suddenly felt an urge to actually make the Duckblade (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9331716#post9331716) class.

[Greysect]

No offense taken! I'm happy to inspire something.

Aside from the restrictions, the ranger would gain those abilities at the same levels as the classes they are derived from?