Impact

So, you're playing D&D and you're fighting some orcs.  All the orcs are armed with feather dusters, so they actually incapable of harming anyone.  And your DM doesn't give XP for combat, so they'll  yield 0 xp upon death.

This combat is a waste of time.  You're just rolling dice until the orcs die.

The encounter is shit because the encounter has no impact.

Impact: the ability to permanently change the game.  The opposite of impact is fluff.

Impact correlates with how your players care.  If no one's invested in the outcome of this encounter, it's hard to have fun.  I think a lot of DMs make the mistake of crafting low-impact encounters.

I'll start by talking about combat encounters, but a lot of this applies to non-combat encounters as well.

by Jakub Rozalski

How To Increase Impact

Deplete Resources

Yes, depleting their spells/HP/potions is a form of impact.  It's low impact, almost by definition.  We can do better.

In a lot of published adventures, the fights are strongly stacked in favor of the PCs, who usually don't have to spend many resources to win.  The only reason to run a combat like this is to make the players feel cool/powerful (not something I recommend designing for--it happens on its own, when it's deserved) or to teach them the rules (and there are better ways to do this than wasting everyone's time with a fluff encounter).

Killing Characters

For most players, this is the most impactful thing that can happen.  It's also shitty when it happens.  We can have a talk about how much lethality is desirable on another post, but the point I want to make is. . .

High risks make people pay attention.  For this reason, difficult combats are necessarily high-impact.

Dear non-OSR readers: this is one reason why OSR folks are always advocating for potentially lethal combat.  Not because we enjoy rolling new characters, but because the combats are more significant.  It's the same reason why lots of sandbox DMs are okay with players deposing kings, burning down cities, and basically just making a mess of things.

I'm not gonna argue that you should make all of you combats brutally difficult.  Easy combats have their place.  But if you are going to make an easy combat, it needs to be impactful in a different way (see also: the rest of this post).

It's entirely possible for a high-lethality combat have everyone attentive, stressed, and bored.  Being trapped in a room with a wight, and no way to hurt it, rolling dice for 20 turns while all of your characters die inevitably.  (This is no different from the feather duster orcs, really.)

If you find yourself in a low-impact combat, hand-wave it.  Last time I played D&D, my players ambushed three old (non-magical, level 0) priests.  Combat took 30 seconds because I just let the player's narrate how they won.

Mutating Your Character Sheet

When I say "attack all parts of the character sheet", this is what I'm talking about.

This is a pretty broad category.  Yes, it includes actual mutations.  This is me telling you that giving the orcish raiders an Axe of Mutation is a great idea.

You can destroy items (rust monster), drain levels (wight), etc.  (PSA: big negative effects like that should be telegraphed and players given a chance to avoid the combat.  Don't ambush players with wights.)

You can also mutate items, mutate spells, turn gold coins into copper coins, turn copper coins into silver coins, permanently blind a PC, permanently give a PC the ability to see in the dark, mess with stats, mess with skills, steal an item out of their inventory, burn all the scrolls in their inventory with dragonfire, change their sex, give them curses.

And remember, all of these effects should be telegraphed before you smack the party with them.  The idea is to get the party invested in the outcome by raising the stakes, so it doesn't work if the players don't know the stakes.

Angels who can forcibly convert your character to their religion.  Since it takes a few "hits" before the PC converts, they have time to run away (which is the point of HP, really).

Nymphs who convince the party to live with her for a two years can also have a pretty big impact on the game.  Players should know the risk before they seek out a nymph.

And everyone knows to avoid gurgans.  Ew.

"I Search The Body"

Yeah, bread and butter.  I know.

PROTIP: Increase player investment by having enemies wield the cool item in combat; don't just leave it in their pocket for them to discover afterwards.

It doesn't even have to be magical.  Like, give one of the orcs a whip with an eagle claw on the end of it, and an eagle skull on the handle.  Fucking awesome.

Or they have crazy potions.  Permanently lose a point of Con to enter a super-rage.  Make sure at least one orc drinks the potion during combat, with more vials visible inside his vest, so the players know what they get if they win.

Or like, the next time the players crit on the orc, the orcs coin purse rips open and coins spill out all over the floor (in addition to the regular effects of the crit).  Show players what the stakes are.

Gaining XP

Yes, this is a thing that exists.

When I used quest XP in my Pathfinder games, I used to give the players a handout with all the available quests on it, and the associated rewards.  I kind of roll my eyes at that sort of thing now, but it accomplished the goal of showing what the stakes were.

Relates to Other Parts of the Map

This is what I mean when I say "random encounter doesn't mean unconnected encounter".

Maybe the really well-dressed orc is the chieftain's son, and asks to be ransomed back when he surrenders.  (Random encounters need to be connected to things outside of themselves.)

Maybe they're saving the king's life.  If they lose this combat, the king will be assassinated.

This is also a chance for your players to show their values.  Let them have the ability to change the game map, and make sure they know it.

Information

Maybe the fact that one of the orcs are in the castle at all means that someone probably smuggled them in. . . but why?

Maybe one of the orcs has an incomplete map of the nearby dungeon.

Maybe the orcs promise to give you the password to the Wyvern's Tower if you let them escape.

They can also convey setting information, or useful information about the dungeon.

The orcs have their hands tattooed black, indicating that they've trained in Ungra, specialize in killing mages, and were hired at a steep cost.

One of the orcs is carrying lockpicks and is covered in recent acid burns.  (Nearby lock is trapped with acid hoses.)

Fluff is Okay

There's nothing wrong with a fun combat.  Fluff has its place.

Respite: Easy combats can be a nice respite after a recent meat-grinder.

Power Trip: Maybe you're playing with ten-year-olds and the birthday boy needs a magic sword.

Ambiance: A corpse being eaten by hungry ghosts can really set the mood.  (No useful information was learned, no real interaction except observation).

Personal Goals: There's no benefit to it, but maybe one of the PCs swore an oath to humiliate every bard they came across.  Whatever.  It's important to their character concept.

Comedy: Fighting drunk goblins in the middle of a pig stampede.

Just remember that you can raise the impact without raising the difficulty.  Maybe give one the goblins a red-hot branding iron.  Same damage, but now the character has a QQ permanently seared into their rump.

-Doesn't change the game.
-Can still be interesting (e.g. you meet peacock-man being devoured by hungry ghosts; he has nothing interesting to say or give).
-Can be good for an ego trip.

Using Impact Wrong

Impact is not the same thing as fun.  Use it in ways that your players react to.  Maybe they're scared of dying and despise lethal combat.  Maybe they want to be heroes and respond really well to civic heroics, such as king saving.

Just be mindful of impact the next time you throw a random group of 3d6 goblins at your party.  Don't let it be just fluff.

Non-Euclidean Geography

This is a continuation of my non-Euclidean architecture posts (part 1, part 2) where I'm not going to postulate anything new, just expand on an idea in part 2 about multi-directional gravity.  See also, the three-sided square hallway in the Meal of Oshregaal.

So, here's a picture of the room you're in right now, viewed from the side.

It's got a chair in it, and doors at both sides.  (You should really think about getting some more furniture.)

The arrows represent the direction and strength of gravity.  As you can plainly see, the gravity in your room points straight down in all places with a normal amount of force (9.8 m/s^2).

But here's another room.  In this room, gravity is upside down!  The doors are in the same places (down), but the chair is now sitting on the ceiling.  The gravity is uniform throughout the room, with moderate strength throughout.

But what fresh new hell is this?  It looks like this third room has both types of gravity in it.  On the west, the gravity points in the normal direction, but in the east, the gravity is inverted.

But that's still nothing too fancy, as far as D&D is concerned.

(By the way, if you stand with one foot in a normal-gravity zone and the other foot in an upside-down-gravity zone, you'll start to do cartwheels in place as one side of your body falls up and the other side of the your body falls down.)

How about this room?  Notice the difference?

In that room above this paragraph, there is no abrupt reversal of gravity.  Instead, gravity gets smaller near the room until it eventually reverses.  It's a gradual inversion, instead of a rough curtain of gravity that you pass through

Let's see how complex we can make this, shall we?

Here's a room where all the gravity points to the center.  Anything not nailed down in this room will fall to the center of the room, where it will join the chair in a big Katamari pile.

If you fell on the chair, you could hang on to it.  Stand on it.  But trying to jump from the chair to the door in the (local) ceiling would be hard--if you jumped off the chair, you'd send the chair crashing against the opposite wall, while you wouldn't move very much at all.  (This is because you weigh a lot more than the chair.  Imagine trying to jump off a planet the size of a tennis ball.)

Here's a room that's the opposite of that one: one where the gravity falls away from the center of the room.

notice the 'B' at the top

In this room, you'd walk past the chair, walk over the door on to the wall, and keep walking across the ceiling, then down the other wall, until you returned to your (much abused) chair.

BUT HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS ESSSAY

Your journey has ups and downs in the local sense.

Do you see what happens when you walk past the chair, going left to right?  The gravity goes from pointing down-left (where you were walking leaning forward) to pointing down-right (where you must start walking leaning back).  And when you are walking while leaning back relative to the floor, it is because you are descending a hill.  Likewise, when you are walking while leaning forward relative to the floor, it is because you are walking uphill.

Therefore, the chair sits atop A LOCAL HILL.

Sorry for the caps, but if you don't understand this section, the rest of this essay isn't going to make much sense.

To think about it another way, the corners of the room are lower (locally speaking) than the walls.  Imagine that there was an immovable rod fixed in the exact center of the room, and you had tied a rope to it, and you were swinging from the rope around and around the room, so that your feet dashed across all four surfaces (floor, wall, ceiling, other wall, repeat) like the hand of a clock.

While swinging from this rope, if you wanted to touch one of the corners with your feet, you would have to descend the rope, down to the corner, since the corner is farther from the center of the room, and therefore lower (locally). 

When I say locally, I mean that if a very tiny ant were passing through, that's how it would seem to the ant.  The corners would be downhill and the chair would be on the top of a hill.  (If you were a giant that filled the whole room, this whole thing goes out the window.)

So, here is another picture of the same room.

In this diagram, the gravity is pointing down, and the floor/walls/ceiling are the ones that are bent.  

THIS DIAGRAM IS LOCALLY IDENTICAL TO THE LAST DIAGRAM.  We have fixed the wonky gravity by making the space wonky instead.

Imagine an ant, walking counterclockwise from the 'B' on the ceiling.  He walks through a valley (the top-left corner), over a hill that includes the (left) door, into another valley (the bottom-left corner), and then over a hill that includes the chair (the actual, global floor of the room), and so on.

Anyway, once you recognize that the last two diagrams depict the same space (locally, from the surface of the walls), we can move on.  (Yes, larger walking-things like giants break this rule; that's literally what makes this space non-Euclidean.)

This next room is subtly unlike the last.  See the difference?

notice the 'A' at the top

This time, the gravity is pointed toward the nearest wall instead of away from the center.

This makes a big difference, because now there are no more local hills and valleys--everything you are walking on is always going to be flat ground.

Here's another local map of the ant's journey across all four surfaces of room A.

And here's another local map of the ant's journey:

The ant doesn't notice the corners because he's really, really tiny.  Just a point in space, really.  If he had eyes as the approached the wall in the first diagram, he would see that the wall curved up at him, just as he would see that the ground was truly flat (non-Euclidean) in the second diagram.  But our and has no eyes, only six infinitesmal footsies that he puts in front of each other.

Even for a point moving along a line, the direction of gravity determines whether the point is going uphill or downhill.

Here's two more pictures of surfaces that are locally flat:

i forgot to add doors and a chair to this one

i also forgot to add doors and a chair to this one

Anyway, once you recognize that the last five images depict the same local journey for the ant, we can move on.  (In all five diagrams, the ant feels like he's walking on flat ground the whole time, since the gravity is always pointed straight towards the surface he is walking on--local down.)

By now, it should be simple to understand what this next diagram would feel like to a person walking across it.  

the slope, as it appears (gravity lines are invisible)

The gravity is normal, except for the middle, where it slants to the left.  If you were to walk across it, it would feel (but not appear) like this:

the slope, as it feels

Basically, an incline.

What would it feel like to walk across this, from the left to the right?  Well, it wouldn't look any different, because it looks like a flat plain.  But as you got into the diagonal-gravity section, it would suddenly feel like you started walking up a hill.  You might fall backwards if you were unprepared.  And once you left the diagonal-gravity section, it would be like walking on flat ground again.  And if you tripped while walking along the diagonal-gravity section and tumbling all the way to the bottom (the left edge of the diagonal-gravity zone).

You could even make the diagonal-gravity section into a sideways-gravity zone, and then you'd have to climb your way across flat ground.

How about this one:

the flat valley, globally (how it appears from far away)

Although it would look flat from a distance, once you actually walked across it, it would feel like this:

the flat valley, locally (how it feels to walk over it)

The gravity changes are gradual, rather than abrupt, so the inclines in the local valley likewise change slope gradually.  It's a rolling valley, rather than the abrupt ramp of the previous example.

Walking across the flat valley would feel exactly like walking down into a real valley; it just wouldn't look that way.  From the bottom of the valley, you'd have no trouble seeing out of the valley, as if your vision was curving.  (And this is an important point--is it the local or the global version of the valley that is accurate?  From a local standpoint, you cannot tell if it is space or gravity that is bent.)

But it's a still a valley, right?  What happens if we fill it with water?

the flat lake, locally

Locally, the flat lake feels like a normal lake.  You walk downhill, enter the water, and swim around.  But from a distance, the lake looks like an enormous water droplet standing on a flat surface.

the flat lake, globally

If you were to walk towards it, you would feel yourself going downhill as you approached it (even though the ground feels flat).  You could run 'downhill' and even jump into the wall of water (equivalent to doing a bellyflop, since gravity is propelling you into the lake surface in both cases).

One big difference would be the light.  Since the lake doesn't sit in an optical valley, it would be well illuminated from sunlight hitting the lake on the backside.  The water would be lit up.  You may see fish and freshwater whales swimming around in there.

Here's the counterpart to the flat lake:

the flat mountain, globally

the flat mountain, locally

 What if you built a building on top of the flat mountain?

Since the gravity lines are always parallel to local up and down, you'd have to build your walls parallel to them.  That means that the walls of your mountaintop castle would appear to be slanting inwards.

It would look like this from far away.

the flat mountain castle, globally

 But once you were actually inside the thing, the walls would feel vertical to you.

the flat mountain castle, locally

Who lives inside?

The Dyzantine Brothers

People will talk freely, when they are frightened.  They will tell you about the three Dyzantine brothers, who live in the castle atop the Flat Mountain.

The brothers are cursed, they say.

Only one brother ever appears at a time, since the other two are cursed to sleep.  The brothers are always caked in frost, despite the heavy jackets they wear, and their breath is always chill bellows, no matter how brightly the sun shines.

One brother is very young, another brother is a youth, and another is middle-aged and stricken with gangrene.

That is what they will tell you, but they are wrong.

The truth is this:

Once there was a wizard who sought to move in the fourth axis, and to move in a direction that was neither up, nor down, nor any of the cardinal directions.  His name was Dyzan.

But three dimensional flesh cannot move in a fourth-dimensional direction, and so he needed to give himself a four-dimensional body.

He found a way to do this involving his own lifespan.  Time would be the fourth dimension, and he would alloy it to his body.

And so Dyzan became a four-dimensional worm.

To three-dimensional human eyes, he looked exactly the same, but he had hijacked his timeline, and plucked all of his past and future selves and wedded them together.

To four-dimensional eyes, Dyzan was a worm.  He was a baby at one end, and an old man at the other.  In the middle, he was larger in circumference, being a full-grown man.  But he was most definitely a worm, being soft and pink and tapered at both ends.

Dyzan immediately had two problems.

The first is that his worm stretched from birth to death, which meant that one end of his four-dimensional body terminated in an old, dying man.

And the dying man did what dying men do, and died.

Dyzan's immune system didn't flow in the fourth dimension.  His blood and lymph were isolated in three-dimensional layers.  When dead old man at the end of Dyzan's bulk began to rot, there was nothing to slow it down.

Dyzan has been rotting from the fat end ever since.  Hence the gangrene that is rapidly consuming his four-dimensional body.

Dyzan's small end, the one that was made from the newborn Dyzan, is fine.  It's a bit larger now, having aged a couple of years.  This irks Dyzan, who prefers his baby self to remain a baby, but his fourth axis is not Time, but now Space in the fourth dimension.

The second problem is that our universe is paper-thin.  To move a short distance in the fourth-dimension is to thrust yourself into the cold void of the outer dark.  This is why Dyzan is always cold--most of his body is in the lightless, freezing nothingness that is outside our three-dimensional slice of the multiverse.

Dyzan is seeking a vehicle that will grant him passage through the outer dark, to a four-dimensional world where he can be a four-dimensional worm in peace.

He didn't really think this one through.

As an NPC, Dyzan will be more than happy to explain how dimensions and non-Euclidean spaces work.  He hopes to get people interested in such things, so that they will be more eager to help him find a way to distant, extra-dimensional shores.  (He can be a quest giver NPC.)

He doesn't have much time.  He's almost halfway rotted already, but he is a long worm, and the gangrene needs to rot through 86 years before it kills him.  The baby--baby Dyzan--will die last.  He'll probably be about four or five years old--too young to understand what is happening.

Among his treasures are an immovable rod and an unstoppable rod (whose velocity cannot be changed by anything while the switch is depressed).  (He can also be an opponent that the PCs attempt to rob.)

In his tower, Dyzan also keeps a gorbel.  He has been trying to coax the secrets of void ships out of the beast, with no success thus far.

Stats as a level 9 wizard.

*Wrap-around - Dyzan can flex his body in the fourth dimension, curling it around so that re-enters the material (three-dimensional) plane as we know it.  This functionally gives him three bodies.  These bodies share HP and spells but otherwise take actions independently.

When he uses his Wrap-around ability, it looks like a frost-bitten corpse has just teleported into the room.  The corpse then rapidly de-ages back to a living age and attacks as normally.  Conversely, if Dyzan puts his smaller, baby-sized end into our dimension, it appears as if a two-year old has just teleported into the room, who rapidly ages up to an appropriate age.

*Fourth-dimensional Shove - Dyzan can shove you into the fourth dimensional outer void that surrounds our dimension.  Treat this as a normal shove attempt.  If it is successful, you are now in the outer void, riding a four-dimensional worm made out of the entire lifespan of a desperate wizard.  It's very cold (1 hp damage per turn) and dark.  You can get back to your own dimension by climbing along the wizard until you reach the part that is currently passing through our dimension.  So if you were pushed out by a 19-year-old wizard and you know that the 23-year-old wizard is still back in the Flat Mountain castle, you would have to climb across the 20-year-old wizard, the 21-year-old wizard, and the 22-year-old wizard in order to reach the 23-year-old wizard who is in the warm, well-lit room trying to kill your friends.

In this case, a year equals 100'.  You'll be climbing along the wizard-worm in a lightless void, but you will not suffocate.  The outer dark is filled with stale air and a very low concentration of peracetic acid, you poor bastard.

Building Houses for Murderhoboes

This is partially a response to Zak's essay about murderhoboes over here.  It's very good.

I agree with that post.  You can have murderhobo games with excitement, drama, and epic arcs.  Murderhobo games need to be recognized as a successful, independent genre, not just "the kind of game you when you try to play Lord of the Rings and fail".

from here

Murderhobo games aren't essentially bad, but they are different.  In this essay, I want to talk about (a) what makes them different, and (b) how to accommodate murderhobos..

This is why people don't like murderhobos:

• Murderhobos often act unheroic, selfish, and/or cowardly.  If the DM expected his game to generate Tolkeinesque behavior, the DM's genre expectations have been frustrated.
• Murderhobos often pass through the game without interacting with much of it.  They are only interested in things to kill and/or steal.  If the DM expected them to talk to the innkeeper and learn about the innkeeper's cursed pony, and they passed it by, the DM's expectations are again frustrated.

I say "the DM's expectations" because the DM is the player who has the most (they wrote/prepared the future paths they game might take) and has the most to lose when those expectations are not met (all that prep work), but really, any player at the table can be discontented, even one of the participating murderhobos.

This is only a problem if the people (a) wanted their game to generate something more Tolkeinesque, and (b) if the game doesn't accommodate their murderhobo playstyle.

If you are DMing a murderhobo game and don't want to be DMing a murderhobo game, you could try:

1. Talking to your players like fucking adults.  A horror module isn't going to be scary unless the players let themselves be scared a little.  This requires them to stop making Monty Python quotes and dick jokes (just remember that there is a cost to sacrificing levity at your table).  Talk what the goals are for both the game and for their characters.

This is the best option and I cannot recommend it enough.

2. Make sure that their actions have consequences.  Innocent people die.  Innkeepers charge extra.  Shopkeepers won't let them in the store (because what sane person would?).  Consequences are important in any game, but if you are using them as a stick to beat your players back into line, be careful you aren't being a dick about it.  

3. Mechanical reinforcement.  The nuclear option is to only award XP for roleplaying or story goals.  This rarely works as well as the DM expects.  At a certain point you might be better off switching to a different system.

4. Accept it and run with it.  There are a lot of things to recommend a murderhobo game.  

• The game is player-driven, because players have a lot of autonomy in what they want to do and how they want to do it.  
• Characters are free to die, because the game is less about their personal story arcs and more about the situations that they get themselves in, and this allows you to keep death as a real and ever-present threat, like any good adventure story.  
• And players are forced to rely on their wits, because pre-plotted games are incapable of challenging player's wits (since you can't give players logic problems they can't solve) and murderhobos usually get themselves into exactly as much trouble as they can barely handle.  (I'm assuming that there is more to do in your game than just combat.  If you're playing 4e or something I don't know what to tell you.)

Now, if you are DMing a murderhobo game and want to DM the best fucking murderhobo game you can, here are some things you can do to accommodate those murderhoboes.  You gotta build a house for 'em.

1. Murderhoboes are like water; they run through the fingers of the plot.  This is why your game world needs to be engaging as fuck.

Make it personal.  The plot cannot be about saving the world, because murderhoboes don't want to save the world.  It needs to be about the PCs.  The heavy handed way to do this is to make it about saving themselves, because murderhoboes always want to save themselves.  This is an option, just remember that you don't have to make it deadly, you just have to make it personal.

Rival adventuring parties are a great way to make it personal.  Opening the chest and finding a mocking note instead of the Emerald Eye of Zuul will chill even the embittered soul of a murderhobo.  And there's a lot of satisfaction to be found later on, when prying a fat emerald from the cold fingers of your dead rival.

2. Make the NPCs more like noir characters.  Everyone wants something from the party, and everyone has a secret (sometimes trifling, sometimes important).  

The whole world needs to have hooks, and NPCs are great motivators, because they are free agents with goals of their own and means to achieve those goals.  A powerful noble that wants them to come to dinner and refuses to take no for an answer.  Someone from the PCs background shows up, recognizes them, and takes immediate action.  PCs who are targetted by a mass pickpocket campaign that is something much greater.

And yes, these are just adventure hooks, but they are sharp adventure hooks.  They stick their hand right into your pocket and rummage through your chestnuts.  They aren't just "some farmers saw a thing, go talk to them" or "here's a handbill with a bounty on it".  Make the hooks things that the players cannot ignore.

3. Give adventure no matter where they wander.  Random tables can help with this.  This may lead to the party feeling like the world is insanely dangerous and full of treasure.  This is correct.

Murderhoboes will often flee from overwhelming odds with no significant reward attached.  This is normal and human and you would do the same thing.  Just don't expect them to be committed to a certain plan of action the way that some idiot like Superman would.  And there may be consequences: someone else will loot the dungeon, or the village may burn down and all the villagers transformed into moaning worm-people.  That's okay.

This is why murderhoboes are better suited for sandbox-style gameplay.  It does require more flexibility from the DM.

4. Give them things to do that aren't limited to the heroic.  Heists, NPC assholes who need to die, rumors of great treasures, a death curse that is slowly turning your heart into treacle.

Find out what they want and then give them a clear path to it.  Was the party impressed by the airship flying overhead last session?  Show them an airship that they can win/steal and make them work for it.

5. Give them things that they can't fight or steal.  Negotiating with a superior force is always fun.  When the goblin armada says, "Give us 75% of your treasure or we'll kill you." the party sometimes comes up with interesting solutions.  Or have Strahd invite them to dinner, and make it plain that there will be terrible consequences if they offend their host.

6. Keep the risks high, and the rewards high.  When in doubt, escalate both.

OSR-Style Challenges: "Rulings Not Rules" is Insufficient

I was a Pathfinder guy who got inspired by blogs, and then spent some time trying to figure out what the fuck the OSR was.  I read stuff, like Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, which is where I first heard about Rulings Not Rules.

The idea is that the OSR encourages a sort of innovative, ad-hoc gameplay where players are always innovating and solving problems with outside-of-the-box solutions.  They're thinking with their heads, not their character sheets.

But saying Rulings Not Rules is merely a description of the system, which is only a small chunk of what actually contributes to gameplay.

What Contributes to Gameplay

1. The system.
2. The adventure.
3. The DM.
4. The players.

The DM and the players could be bundled together, because the DM operates by a social contract, sort of like a charter.

Anyway, it's not enough to have a system that allows for rulings and improvisation.  If you want OSR-style gameplay, you need to encourage/allow it at all levels.

System Level

Like Mr. Finch says, this is about getting players to stop thinking with their character sheets.  (This is why skill lists are potentially so poisonous--players thinking about solutions sometimes start and end by looking at their skill list as if it were a list of permissions.)

(1) And to do that, you need an incomplete system.  You need to have room for rulings, and that means that there have to be gaps between the rules.  To put it another way, if I wrote up a game system that included two pages of rules on how to attack tiny animals in your stomach, I've codified the acceptable options and excluded more esoteric solutions.  (I've also complicated the game by introducing a fiddly and highly-situational subset of rules.)

If a players is familiar with the game system, they'll think back to what they know about the rules as a first resort.  Only when they've exhausted everything they remember from the How To Attack Tiny Animals In Your Stomach page, will they start to innovate.

For an example of a more complete skill system, all you need to do is look at the skill descriptions from 3.5th edition.  The more complete a ruleset is, the more tempting (and valid) it is to say "well, it's not covered in the rules, so you can't do it".  Or worse "this is covered in the rules, and if we add up all the situational modifiers, you will do so at a -14 penalty even though I personally agree that this task shouldn't be that difficult".

This is why I like running games without Perception checks, Find Trap checks, and social skills.  It leaves more room for player innovation.

(2) You also need a system that supports rulings.  There are two parts to this.

First, the system cannot have too much interdependence between the moving pieces.  Some mechanics are isolated (XP) while others touch on many other mechanics (Ability Scores).  The more interconnected a mechanic is, the more knock-on effects you'll have when you modify it.  If you want to just make a quick ruling and get on with your game, you usually want to make sure that your quick ruling won't have any unforeseen consequences.  For example: 

DM: "Alright, you all manage to tread water for 18 hours, but the act was so exhausting that you've all lost all of your healing surges."

Player: "Wait, I can't use any of my class abilities without any healing surges.  In fact, I turn into a pumpkin without any healing surges."

DM: "Well, we've already established that exhaustion drains healing surges.  That's been a house rule for months.  And treading water for 18 hours is definitely exhausting."

Player: "But that was before I picked up the Pumpkin King prestige class.  It's unfair now."

A little caricatured, but you get the point.

Second, the system needs to have simple ways to adjudicate rulings.

My first resort is to just ask a player to roll under the most relevant ability score. 

• It's fast.  
• The player already knows what I'm talking about because their ability scores are written down right at the top of their character sheet.  It's an associated mechanic, so it makes intuitive sense.

If it doesn't seem tied to any particular aspect of their character (i.e. it's entirely luck-based or dependent on some external variable that the character has no control over), I usually just ask for an X-in-6 roll, which I make up on the spot.  I like using a six-sider for these, because even a 1-in-6 chance is likely enough that it'll happen every once in a while.

For more extended efforts, I like some variation of "you need to get X successes before some other limit is hit".  But I only use these extended rulings very rarely.

Bad rulings are ones that are slow or confusing.  But the worse rulings are the ones that are ultimately unsatisfying, in the sense that they don't give results (or chances of results) that mesh with the player's expectations of how the world works.  If your make some rulings, and the consequence is that halflings are more intimidating than orcs, that's (probably) a bad ruling.  If you make some rulings, and the consequence is that even the most untrained peasant has a 90% chance to track anything, that's a bad ruling.  Just as players use common sense to come up with stuff that requires a ruling, use common sense to make rulings (as opposed to precedent or some other analogous rule you saw somewhere else).

Adventure Level

You also need to give players problems that are best solved through innovation.

If you give them a problem with three orcs in it, they're probably going to solve it through an already-established method: initiative and attack rolls.

Here are some good examples of OSR-style problems.

• Get over this moat.  It's full of crocodiles.  (I think I first heard this example from Zak. S, and it's been stuck in my head ever since.)
• There's a circle of mushrooms with a girl inside it.  Everything inside the circle of mushrooms will do everything in their power to get more people inside the circle (no save).  The girl is already their thrall.
• There's a tiny octopus inside your stomach and it's biting you.
• There's a bowl built into the ground.  It's lined with gold but full of acid.  (From ASE.)
• There's a smooth glass sphere, 100' high, with an opening at the top.  It doesn't roll easily.  Inside is something you want.  (From some LotFP product, I forget which one.)
• The bad guy cannot be hurt by any weapon forged by mortal hands.
• This glass sphere (3' in diameter) is filled with gems and horrible undead snakes.
• Pretty much all of the dungeons that +Chris McDowall writes.  He's like a laser pointer when it comes to writing interesting problems.

Writing a good OSR-style problem is tougher than it sounds.  It needs to be something that. . .

• has no easy solution.
• has many difficult solutions.
• requires no special tools (e.g. unique spells, plot devices).
• can be solved with common sense (as opposed to system knowledge or setting lore).
• isn't solvable through some ability someone has on their character sheet.  Or at least, it isn't preferentially solvable.  I'm okay with players attacking the sphinx (a risky undertaking) if they can't figure out the riddle, because risky-but-obvious can be a solution, too.

The fun thing about OSR-style problems is that they often require rulings-not-rules.  (Try to solve the tiny octopus in 4e with RAW.)  So there's a benefit in having a system that's easily hackable.

But at the same time, OSR-style problems aren't dependent on system.  You could plop them into any system and then players will still have to innovate to solve them (and probably have a lot of fun in the process).

It's also important to give your players OSR-style tools.  (This is an idea I've half-articulated before.)

The anti-examples of this are going to be things like a sword +1, or a cloak that gives you +4 to stealth.  Anything that gives you a numeric bonus is not an OSR-style tool.  Anything that gives you a known, established ability is not an OSR-style tool (like a potion of healing).

These are tools that allow for innovative problem solving.  They stretch the brain.  Good examples include:

• Immovable Rod.
• Polyjuice Potion.
• Ring of Cadaverous-but-Reversible Sleep.
• Love Potion.
• Psychic Paper.
• Sovereign Glue.
• Cursed Wand of Enlarge, only enlarges one part of an object.
• Bag of Infinite Rats.
• Some of these items.
• And some of these items, too.

I especially like to make these types of items single-use or limited-use.  It prevents the item from becoming a known solution to an established problem (which is pretty much the antithesis of OSR-style problem solving).

DM Level

There's two things you gotta do.

First, talk to your players like adults.  Tell them that this game will have problems that aren't obviously solvable, and that some of these problems will have solutions that aren't on the character sheet. 

Actually, if you're dealing with complete newbies to tabletop RPGs, the less stuff that is on their character sheet, the better.  A level-0 funnel can help get new players thinking about common-sense solutions to problems.  Adding skills to the game after one or two sessions can also be a big help (if you ever add skills at all).

Second, you need to reward creativity when you see it.  When players ask you if something is possible, say yes.  (Or "yes, but".)  When you are devising a ruling for some ridiculous player shenanigans, lean in the player's favor.

I'm not advocating that you should allow stupid ideas to succeed, but solving an OSR-style problem is usually going to involve some kludgery, so be lenient when deciding how likely crocodiles are to eat a bomb disguised as a pig.

Player Level

I'm writing this article with the assumption that everyone enjoys the same types of game that I do.  This is not always true (unfortunately).  Talk to your DM and each other about your expectations.  Give feedback.

When it actually comes to solving these problems, I can't really help.  It's just you and your brain.  Here a few pointers, though.

• Think about all of the resources at your disposal, including resources in other rooms.  
• It helps to take notes.
• Make the hireling do it.  
• See if any of your magic items can do cool stuff if used in combination--sometimes the answer is spread across multiple peoples' inventories.  
• Take it to someone who knows more about it.  
• If it looks like it might do something horrible, pick it up on the way out.  
• Come back later with the right tool.  
• Experiment, experiment, experiment.  
• Before you do anything, ask the DM lots of questions.  
• Before you touch the dangerous parts, learn as much as you can about the non-dangerous parts.

Dwarves Are Lazy Because They Are Hardworking

The industriousness of dwarves is well established, even across multiple settings.  They're also dour, obsessed with gold, and possessing of an ambiguously Scottish accent.  They don't like elves or trees, but they like grand halls and forges.  Family and tombs.  Honor and beer.  Lots and lots of beer.

Dwarves are extremely well characterized.  The dwarven character is as strong and as distinctive as the character of Homer Simpson.  Except one is a single dude and the other is an entire race.

Race is the lazy way to define your character.  (That's one reason why I killed all the humans.)

What I mean by well-characterized is: I have no problem imagining what Homer Simpson would do in any given situation, just as I have no problem imagining what a dwarf would do in any given situation.  As soon as you told me their name, I knew them.  I can already hear their voice.

And of course, that's why people play dwarves.  They're prepackaged bundles of character.

No longer do you have to define your character through word and through deed!  You merely have to say "I'm a dwarf!" and people know all about your character, exactly as if you had said "I'm Homer Simpson!"  It's a big shortcut, and best of all, this characterization doesn't require any roleplaying at all.

Imagine the inverse.  Imagine that you decided to play Homer Simpson the fighter, but that you introduced him to the other players as Scrotar the Gladiator.  And then you said things that Homer would say, and did things that Homer would do, and over time, the other players (and in-game NPCs) would get a very good feel for your character.  He would be very well characterized, and you would have earned it.

But that's difficult, and takes a long time, which is why people like being dwarves. It's nice to have NPCs treat you as your character expects to be treated, and if you're a dwarf, that takes about five minutes.

The same is true for elves (haughty, beautiful,slim, clean, beardless, magical, serene, fuckin' Mary Sues), orcs (yell, smash, intimidate, be tough as a two dollar steak), and gnomes (chipper, excitable, mischievous, witty, impulsive, mildly magical).

People who change their setting so that "their dwarves/elves/whatever are different" would be wise not to change their dwarves too much, since players expect a certain degree of cliche dwarfiness to be present (so they can roleplay their character easier) even though they might sigh at how generic the dwarves are in this setting.

You Should Play a Dwarf If. . .

If you're new to roleplaying, by all means, be a dwarf.  The easiest characters to roleplay are the ones that are the most strongly characterized.  A stereotypical dwarf fulfills that niche handily.  And after you establish your dwarfiness, you cban start striking out into new territory, away from your racial stereotype.  Perhaps you're the only dwarf who likes trees.  Or maybe you're a shitty craftsman.  Or you eschew beer in favor of opiates.  That's (mildly) interesting stuff.

Or you might just play a hack and slash game, where characterizations don't really matter because everyone is a murderhobo.  In that case, this whole essay is moot.  Go put on your pointy helmet, beard-face.

You might not be a confident roleplayer, or you might not have a good idea for a character.  In that case, may I suggest a dwarven ancestry for monsieur?  It's strong, reliable, and easy.

Or you genuinely don't give a shit about characterization.  For you, the game lies in other directions.  That's fine, too.  There's many ways to play a game.  Don't let me shit in your fun-bucket.

You Should Stop Being a Dwarf

There is no if.  You should stop being a dwarf.

Just be a human.  Anything a dwarf can be, a human can be.  Greedy?  Humans can be that. Honorable?  Humans can be that.  Drunk and possessing a ridiculous accent?  Humans can do that.  Scornful of elves and their fruit wines?  I already do that all the time.

Rolling a human forces you to come up with a unique character concept.  If you can't come up with one, and would prefer to fall back upon the ol' bearded crutch, consider some famous personalities.  Be Bill Murray from Ghostbusters.  Be Nolan's Batman.  Hell, be Nolan's Joker.  Be a good-guy version of Hitler.  Be Scrooge McDuck (miserly, loves his asshole nephews).  Be Borat.  Be Princess Mononoke.  Be that guy from the Old Spice commercials.  Be Han Solo.

Show, don't tell.

Second, being a demi-human can actually interfere with a lot of roleplaying/characterization choices.  Want to romance the human princess while you're a halfling?  Get ready for a lot of size jokes.

Did you have an arm replaced with a troll's arm and a second row of teeth from a mutation?  Well, that sounds alright for a human, but for an elf to have those things, it seems a bit overloaded, conceptually.  Like a half-demon dwarf who invented the grenado and is attempting to be the next king, also seems a bit overloaded.  But half-demon human seems alright, I think.

Objection!

Strawman: when we play fantasy races we can explore new roleplaying opportunities!  Like what it's like to be a dwarf who's afraid of the dark, or an elf who is dreaded how her husband will die from old age while she is still young.  Can you really explore those things if everyone is a human?

Of course you can.  You can have Genghis Khan's son who is afraid of horses.  Or you can be in love with a person who is dying from the Slow Death.

Or, if you really want that whole "lives underground, drinks heavily, reveres ancestors" thing, have you thought about how weird it would be to just transpose humans into the dwarven lifestyle?  We already accept the dwarven culture as normal, but humans who spend their whole lives underground, digging their own graves, toiling over furnaces, and birthing their children atop anvils. . . that's way weirder.  And therefore, more interesting and more memorable.

Also, another benefit to having everyone be a human: it creates a zone of normalcy within the party.  The game stays firmly rooted, and doesn't drift up into kitchen-sink fantasy, where everyone is a different race of unique snowflakes.  This leaves room for weirdness later, so that when the elves emerge naked from the trees gnawing on pieces of babyflesh, they are the other and they are weird and horrible and alien.  As it should be.

The forest should be a little alien and hostile.  This is harder to do if you have elves in your party.

The underground should be unknown and oppressive.  This harder to do if you have dwarves in your party.

Dungeon Checklist

Sometimes I write dungeons.  Today I wrote a checklist of things to put in the dungeon.  The first couple items are pretty obvious, but it's still good to enumerate their usage.

How to Use This Checklist

Read it once before you write you dungeon.  Then read it again when you're done, to make sure you got everything.

1. Something to Steal

Treasure gives players a reason to go into the dungeon in the first place.  On a metagame level, treasure is money, money is XP, and XP is tied to the idea of character advancement.  It's the prime mover of the system.

Two points.  First, remember that treasure doesn't need to be treasure.  It can be:

• Shiny shit, such as boring ol' coins, or the jewelled brassiere of the zombie queen.
• Knowledge, such as where to find more treasure, or information you can use to blackmail the king.  Or even a sage, who can answer a single question honestly.
• Friendship, such as an amorous purple worm that follows you around and protects you when it's hungry and a little bored.  Occasionally, it leaves egg sacs laying around for you to fertilize (and it will get angry if you don't sit on them for at least an hour).
• Trade Goods, like a wagon full of tea (worth 10,000gp).  When I give out large parcels of trade goods as treasure, I give half of the XP now, and the other half of the XP when it's sold off.  (I just really like the idea of a mercantile campaign.)
• Territorial, like a tower the players can claim as their own, or an apartment in the nice party of the city (and the chances of being stabbed in your sleep are dramatically reduced).
• Useful adventuring shit, like a magic sword, scroll of blot out the sun, or a parachute.

Second, treasure tells a story, too.  Cover your treasure in religious symbols, annoint it in trollblood.  Don't let your coins be coins!

2. Something to be Killed

This is pretty obvious.  Of course there are threatening things in the dungeon.  There has to be some challenge otherwise it isn't a dungeon.  The simplest way to do that is with things that are trying to kill you.  (Yes, you can have monsterless dungeons based on traps.  Those are cool, but that's why this checklist is written in pencil, not in stone.)  There are many ways to make combat with even basic monsters more interesting.

Also remember that dungeons tell their story through nouns.  The history of a dungeon is usually relayed through monster choices (why use orcs when you can use degenerate cannibal versions of the original dwarven inhabitants?) and descriptions of those creatures (a barnacle-covered zombie, an iron golem charred by dragonfire, the elven armor scraps that the goblins are wearing, the elven wand-rifle that one of the goblins has for some reason).

Examples: 2d6 orcs, 3d6 mudmen.

3. Something to Kill You

Dungeons are designed to be beaten.  That's why we don't fill them with inescapable obstacles (rocks fall, everyone dies) or impenetrable barriers (sorry, the whole dungeon is wrapped in an adamantine dome, you can't get in).

BUT dungeons need to feel like they were designed to be unbeatable.  It's important to feel like this isn't just a bowling alley where the DM sets up the pins for the players to knock down.  You need to have deadly elements in your deadly dungeon for it to feel deadly.  

Just follow these two important rules.  Try to follow at least one

• Label your deadly shit as such.  A sleeping dragon.  A door barricaded from the player's side with a sign warning of deadly spiders.  These things look deadly from a distance.
•  A chance to escape.  Maybe the dragon can't fit into the smaller tunnels around his lair.  Maybe the manticore is chained to a rock.

Both of these serve the same function: they allow the players to pick their own battles, something you can't do on a linear railroad game.  I think that's why a lot of OSR folks hate the idea of boss battles: because they're the one battle in the dungeon that is required.

Horrible monsters that are avoidable give the players agency and allows them to be architects of their own demise.

Sidenote: I think that nearly all combats should be escapable. Sometimes with a cost (dropped food, gold, maybe a dead PC or hireling). In my experience PCs will get themselves killed often enough even if the enemies never left the rooms they were in.

Also, putting "unbeatable" monsters in your dungeon also allows the dungeon to be self-scaling.  The level 1 party will just tip-toe past the dragon, while the level 6 party might consider fighting it so they steal the treasure it is sleeping on top of.  And just like that, a dungeon becomes appropriate for both level 1 parties AND level 6 parties.  (And this is another reason why I think OSR games have such a wide range of level-appropriateness--It's both easy and expected that players will flee from fights that they can't win).

4. Different Paths

Different paths allow different parties to experience the dungeon in different ways.  It's a randomizer, similar to what you'd get if you ordered the dungeon rooms according to a random number generator.  And it keeps you (the DM) from getting bored

Player agency.  Players can choose the path they're better suited for.  The party with 2 clerics can take the zombie-infested tunnel, and the party with air support can get themselves dropped into the courtyard.  It also allows dungeons to be a little bit self-adjusting, too.  Players who are more confident can challenge the front door, while lower level parties will creep around the outside.

It allows parties to walk away from rooms they don't like.  Part of the OSR philosophy (as I see it) is the ability to walk away from fights.  If a party doesn't want to fight a room with archer skeletons entombed in the walls (especially after two of them were blinded in the last room) they can retreat and find another way in.  It's an option they have.

The last reason to have multiple paths is to allow for dungeon mastery.  I don't mean DMing.  I mean that, as the players learn more about the dungeon, they become better at exploiting its geography.  They can lure the carrion crawler over the pit trap that they know is there.  They can retreat into a looped path, instead of retreating into unexplored rooms (always a dangerous tactic).

At the same time, don't throw in random paths just for the hell of it.  The more paths you put in, the less linearity there is in your dungeon.  And sometimes you want linearity, especially when it comes to teaching your players things, or giving clues.  Sometimes you want to show the players the eerily clean hallway before they bump into the gelatinous cube.  Maybe you want them to meet the zombies with hook hands before they meet the room of crawling, animated hands.

There's nothing wrong with a little linearity if you're putting it in there for a reason.  I still think that a heavily branched dungeon should be the default assumption, but linear sections of a dungeon are a venal sin, not a mortal one.

5. Someone to Talk To

People forget this one, and yet it's the one I feel strongest about.  Strong enough for caps lock.  EVERY DUNGEON NEEDS SOMEONE TO TALK TO.  It's a roleplaying game.  NPCs are the cheapest and easiest way to add depth to your dungeon.  It's easy because everyone knows how to roleplay a generic goblin prisoner and has a pretty good idea of what information/services that goblin prisoner can provide.  And it's got depth because there are so many ways that a party can use a goblin prisoner.  There's almost no bloat--you don't need to invent new mechanics, and it takes almost no space to write "There is a goblin in a cage.  His name is Zerglum and he has been imprisoned by his fellows for setting rats free."

The problem is that a lot of dungeons are treasure vaults, tombs, and abandoned mines.  The only creatures you usually encounter in those places are undead, golems, oozes, and vermin with ambiguous food chains.  None of those are really known for being chatty.  So, here are some options:

• Rival adventuring party.
• Goblins never need explanation.
• Spell effect, like a chatty magic mouth spell or something.
• Graveyard nymph.
• Ghosts.  Make a sympathetic one.  Everyone expects them to be jerks.
• Ghoul head, sitting on a shelf.  It can talk if you blow through its neck-hole.
• Old man trapped in a painting.  Communicates by painting.
• Demon trapped in a mirror.  Communicates by repeating your own phrases back to you.
• Ancient war machine trapped by a stasis field bomb.  Seeks enemies who died thousands of years ago, will self-destruct when it learns that it lost the war.
• Consider giving your players speak with stones or speak with lock spells.  Dungeons usually have those.
• Demonic succubus, who has spent the last 1000 years on a bed, trapped by the silver threads woven into a circle in the bedsheet
• Pterodactyl-riding barbarians who are looting the place
• Time-displaced wizard, caught in a paradox while exploring the place.  Resets every 3 minutes.

6. Something to Experiment With

Aside from something that will probably kick the party's ass, I think this might be the most OSR-ish.

These are the unexplainable, the weird, and the unknown.  And I don't mean unknown like an unindentified potion is unknown.  I mean something that introduces a new wrinkle into the game.

• A room with two doors of different sizes.  Anything that is put into the small door emerges from the large door at twice the size, and vice versa.  Anything that goes through the doors twice in the same direction (double enlarged or double shrunk) has terrible consequences.
• A pedestal.  If anything is placed on top of it, it turns into its opposite.  (Okay, the opposite of a sword is an axe, but what is the opposite of a banana?)
• A metal skeleton.  If a skull is placed atop it, a speak with dead spell is cast on it.
• Wishing wells that are portals to other small ponds in the dungeon.  Where the portal goes is determined by what item you throw in the well before you jump in.  Copper coins, silver coins, gold coins, gems, and arrows all lead to different places.
• Two doorways.  Impassable when you walk through a single one, but if two people walk through them simultaneously, they are fused together and transported to a city of similarly-fused people.
• A machine that turns finished products into raw goods, and raw goods into ammunition.
• A sundial that controls the sun.
• A boat golem that flees from loud noises.  You can direct it by standing at the back of it and shouting.
• Two holes in the wall.  If two limbs are put in the holes, they are swapped.  If only one limb is put in the hole, it is severed.  Can be used to graft new limbs onto amputees.

There's some overlap here with magic items.  There's also some overlap with non-magical stuff, too.  There's also some overlap with combat, because some combats can be puzzly, or can rely on new rules/victory conditions.

Combat, for experienced players, for the most part, is a solved problem.  Weird shit is important because they give the players an unsolved problem.

Players know how to best leverage their attacks and abilities.  Sure, you can mix it up a bit, and force them to think and use different tactics.  But by and large, they already know how to use their character to their best effect.  They've been practicing it for levels and levels, after all.

(It's important to let player practice the stuff they're good at, i.e. combat with their character, but it's also important to put throw some wrenches in there, too.)

Weird shit follows its own rules.  Suddenly, players don't know anything about how to solve this problem, and they have to figure it out anew.

Bonus points if its something that could potentially unbalance your game.  Nothing gives a player more agency than the ability to completely derail your setting.  (Not that you need to go that far.)

More bonus points if its something that will probably hurt the players at first, but can be used to their advantage once they've figured out how it works.

One last perk: it gives level 1 characters a chance to be as useful as level 10 characters.  Anyone can stick an arm into a hole in the wall, and anyone can figure out what it does.  Weird shit often poses threats and rewards that are level-agnostic.

7. Something the Players Probably Won't Find

This one might be contentious.  Why put stuff in your dungeon that your players won't find?

First, you don't have to put much in the dungeon.  Just a few words here and there to reward the players who are more thorough.  "Inside the purple worm's stomach is a bag of holding full of 1000 gallons of purple worm stomach acid."  Or "The pirate captain has a gold bar hidden in his peg leg, wrapped in felt so that it won't rattle."  It's not like you're designing multiple cool rooms that no one will ever get to enjoy.  (I mean, I do that sometimes.)

I think it's important to hide things because there is a sincere joy in exploration and testing the limits.  If all of the things in a dungeon are obvious, why even bother wondering what is at the bottom of the well?  Is there anything interesting buried underneath all of this mud?  Players who don't have the time or resources to explore a dungeon 100% (and they shouldn't) will always walk away with a feeling of enormity, that there was always more to find.

Sure, completion is a nice feeling, but so is wonderment.

I like to reward people who are good at the game.  And being good at finding things (thinking about where they might be, exploring those places despite the risk it involves) is one of the ways that a player can be good at D&D.  I've written about this before.

It should be a spectrum.  Some things (most things) should be out in the open. Some stuff should be hidden behind curtains.  And some stuff should be tucked deeply away in the dungeon's folds.

So yeah, the next time you decorate a room with a mural of a defeated king presenting tribute to his conquerer, be sure to put an actual treasure chest in the wall behind the painting of a treasure chest.  (I've run that dungeon three times and no one has ever found it.  I get a little excited every time I describe it to players.)

There's also undead skeletons entombed in the wall behind the paintings of skeletons.  No one's ever found them, either.  But some day, some party with the right alloy of greed, cleverness, and patience will find them, and that will be great.