Monster AI, Challenge Adjustments and Learning to Love the Monster Manual

Runehammer is one of my favorite You Tube channels.  Hankrin Feranale (hankerin’ fer an ale. Get it?) presents D&D as an old-school-meets-board-games tactical story-telling experience, and it works for me.  Ken Hite once said the whole point of narrative in D&D is to string the fights together, and Hankrin seems to subscribe to that philosophy.

That said, he knows how to squeeze a lot of narrative juice out of combat encounters.  His videos on monster AI and adjusting challenges are must-watch for any GM who wants to get more out of combat than a hit-point countdown.  (Note that Runehammer started out as Drunkens and Dragons, and Hank gets hammered in quite a few of his vids, but the core content is worth the obnoxious You-Tubery.)

I applied the wisdom in these videos to my Dr. Levinson the-Fly-Meets-Immortan-Joe cul-de-sac encounter, and here’s what I came up with:

AI for Dr. Levinson:

Hankrin suggests pre-determining monster behavior via logic gates and writing the routines on index cards.  Here are my three cards, for preparation (his passive state, in which he prepares his evil master plan for world insectoid domination), aggressive and retreating behavior.

LOS is line of sight, which means he tries to get out of sight for ranged attacks, or find a LOS for ranged attacks.  Place of Safety means he’s in his lair, rather than out and about getting ready for world domination.  Timer means he sets off the timer (see below) that sends a wave of buggy death into the surrounding area.

Next, I applied Hankrin’s three challenge factors of damage, disruption and duration.

Damage: Since I’m going to be using Pugmire which is based on the  5e SRD, I decided to look at the 5^th Monster Manual to check out the Ankheg, a bug-monster that DR. Levinson was going to summon on a natural 20.  I found that the Ankheg was essentially what I wanted Dr. Levinson to be, so now he’s mechanically a super-intelligent Ankheg with Spider Climb and the ability to summon Stirges on any even roll above 16.

I decided to double the damage for Dr. Levinson, because I want him to be deadly and scary, as well as a potential recurring villain.  I’m using fixed monster damage, an option listed in the 5e MM, so we’ll see how that goes.

There are enough new factors in this encounter that I didn’t also want to add the complexity of monsters from multiple sources. I took out most of the 13^th Age and Other Dust mechanics for Levinson and added an animated carpet to the encounter.  The “carpet” is really a swarm of insects controlled by Levinson that overwhelms a character and tries to force its way into their body.  Gross and scary, I hope.

Disruption: Disruption dictates how much freedom to act the PC’s have in the encounter.  Hank’s illustration of a low disruption encounter is fighting a balrog in an empty parking lot.  A high-disruption encounter might have broken terrain, traps, changes in elevation, and so on.  The disruption effects in Levinson’s lair are all DC 12 (another of Hank’s ideas: one disruption DC per encounter), and they all have the same effect: they disrupt the characters’ ability to act freely. The lair is full of termite-damaged floors and walls, line-of-sight disruptions in the form of debris and termite mounds, and an ongoing effect called “swarm skeeve” (name suggestions welcome, btw) that’s a DC 12 Charisma save.  Characters who fail the save must spend a round swatting, stomping and generally being occupied with the layer of insects that undulate all over and fly through the encounter.  Certain areas of the floor are badly damaged; avoiding them requires a Wisdom or Dex save. Characters who fail must spend a round extracting a foot or other appendage from the broken floor. Between the skeevy swarm, the weakened structure, and the termite mounds blocking line of sight, this should be a fairly disruptive encounter.

Duration: If Dr. Levinson successfully retreats, the PC’s have 1d4 rounds to prepare before he unleashes a wave of heritor bugs, which will overwhelm the PC’s and disperse into the world in a twenty mile radius from the cul de sac.  All settlements within that radius will have their resources reduced by one level.  All level one settlements will be destroyed. (Rules for enclave rankings and resources can be found in Other Dust.)

So there you have it!  AI and challenge tuning for Pugmire and other PA games!  I hope you enjoy the ideas from Runehammer.  Give him a look, a like, and subscribe if you dig his stuff!

(Here are links to Hank’s video on timers and one of his brilliant room design vids.  I used these ideas in the encounter design, but I didn’t write them in to keep it reasonably brief.)

Timers video

Dungeon Building

It all comes together in Pugmire. (Seriously.)

Pugmire is where it all comes together. Less Fury Road and More Gamma World, Pugmire is a game set in a post-human future where uplifted dogs, cats, lizards and rats live in rough equivalent of a D&D-style medieval society. The first thing that comes to a lot of minds when they hear of this setting are either furry jokes or jokes about dogs’ less noble behaviors like humping legs and sniffing butts. Go ahead and have your giggle, but then get ready for some deep role playing.

The sense of loss in Pugmire is profound. Dogs all have some response to the Code of Man, a set of edicts meant to provide moral structure for dog society. Some dogs respond to the call of Man with serious devotion, even dedicating their lives to Man’s service: doing good works in Man’s name, seeking artifacts of His reign, and generally trying to shepherd others towards the ideal of being “Good dogs.” Others are skeptical pragmatists, wondering if Man was ever really worth obeying or if He was in fact just another animal: nor more or less noble than the dogs themselves. Still others revel in their freedom and run (and run and run and run) with it. Each dog’s attitude towards Man provides a large part of her role-playing impetus. The Pugmire book suggests that man has perhaps evolved and shed his mortal shell to ascend to a higher plane.

Enter Other Dust. In this setting, the Earth has been abandoned by star-faring humans because it has become an inaccessible death trap. The setting details why, but the parties responsible for isolating Earth so totally are a cadre of seven human super-psychics called The Crazed. These men and women are the lich-kings of the setting: horrifically powerful, immortal, and completely insane. If Arkham Asylum were a prison for mad gods, the Crazed would be right at home there. Add this bit of back story to the world of Pugmire, don’t tell your players, and suddenly you’ve got a role-playing time bomb worthy of John Wick. What will your devoted shepherd do when she discovers that the wasted earth she and her puppies have inherited came to her compliments of the best Man had to offer?  Will your cynical ratter still aspire to be a Good Dog when he has had to journey through a forest of formerly-human cancer trees, the handiwork of one of the Crazed?  If Mankind was so simultaneously fragile and cruel, what is the use of following the code? What will the dogs do when their gods are dead?

Pugmire bills itself as lighthearted and family friendly, but with the backstory of Other Dust, darker themes become an option.

Beyond its potential for thematic depth and role-playing drama (meaning stories in which characters must change in some way as they progress), Pugmire is very versatile mechanically. Based on the D&D 5^th edition SRD, Pugmire invites monsters and locations from pretty much all editions of D&D and other d20 material (d20 Gamma World gathering dust? How about d20 Call of C’thulhu? Bust them out and populate some ruins). While written for Savage Worlds, Andy Hopp’s Low Life is a great source of weird cults, locations and misinterpretations of the age of Man.  Even The Day after Ragnarok can provide cool adventure hooks and campaign frameworks for a game of Pugmire.  The Mutant: Year Zero free starter booklet provides some cool ideas and locations that would sing in a Pugmire campaign. And I would be remiss if I left out Numenera, a game which while fun in its own right, is full of ideas applicable to Pugmire.

Of all o these options, Other Dust provides the most Pugmire bang for your buck. OD has tools for generating gear, artifacts, locations, and adventures that are just what the Shepherd ordered for Pugmire. While capable of great thematic depth, Pugmire also shines as a game about exploring ruins and fighting monster, which Other Dust robustly supports with many maps and tables. The free material for Other Dust, including the excellent adventure Grandfather’s Rain, is bursting with adventure hooks, creatures and gear to challenge and entice Pugmire players. The free zine,The Sandbox, also has a great ruin generator. Finally, Hard Light, an adventure for Stars Without Number, has a tool set for generating tombs that would allow a sci-fi spin on a Barrowmaze-style campaign.

Pugmire won’t give you Mutant Crawl Classics-style gonzo craziness (though the patron AI's could make an appearance) or grim survival rules (though you could import them) or cool car battles (ditto), but it will provide a unique post-apocalyptic take on the terrible consequences of getting what you want.  It  will also give you full use out of your 5e books and it invites use of other material of multiple genres. I highly recommend Pugmire, and I am looking forward to seeing what my game group does with it.