The Dungeon Game: What Happened in August
With six months of the Dungeon Game gone by, and August being the traditional vacation time in Bulgaria, I took a break from the campaign to focus on other things and to avoid burnout, a common issue I have run into with previous campaigns that I've run.
However, just because we were not playing does not mean that the Crownless Company sat idle back in town, far from it! Plenty of things happened during this prolonged downtime, and I will go over them here in no particular order.
Crownfall Keep and Stonehell Renovations
Tally Town/Crownfall Keep has been the base of the Crownless Company for quite a while at this point, and it has grown steadily over the months as money is being invested and new members are brought in (be they leveled NPC followers, or entire groups like the Ghost Beggars briggands and the inmates from floor 2). However over the month, with extensive funding from the saved funds and with help and technical knowledge by Rutger the robot and Vaco Adjacent, the whole area now finally has a working water-mill generator and rudimentary electrification. So far it has mostly taken the shape of lighting the various buildings as well as Crownfall Keep itself, but further plans are definitely in the future for expanding what the electricity is used for.
Further more, with a bigger base of laborers to work with, Tina the Titanic begins extensive renovations within the dungeon itself, blocking off parts of Floor 1 (with Sniv's kobolds informed and agreeing to not mess with it) creating easier and more direct access to floor 2 and the elevator that the party have found, as well as creating secure parts of the dungeon with no underworld denizens meandering in there, giving the party the space to enact future plans (such as the mass creation of orcs as a force to use against the Hobgoblins and their elven masters).
Telperion Desh Becomes a Lich
Telperion Desh, with perhaps a potential future in politics back in the Supreme Kingdom, invests a hefty 10k gilders to get the ritual (and associated paperwork with the Church of Law) to transform himself into a Lich. With the transformation complete, Telperion is now technically two entities. One is the spirit, housed securely in a magical holding object, and the other is his former body, which he still occupies.
Lichdom, in and of itself, does not provide much in the way of power. Most liches one runs into are powerful simply because they have lived for centuries and grown and hoarded power and magic throughout all of that. But Telperion is still in the first steps of that path. Now that he is Undead, it means he does not need to worry about food, drinking, sleeping and indeed even breathing, which affords him a lot more free time to focus on magical research and projects, a common reason among magicians to abandon mortality.
Kurgan the Hound is Reincarnated
Another act of Telperion's, with relatively minor importance in the grand scheme of things, but of emotional importance to the Crownless Company, is the Reincarnation of one of their fallen wardogs. While normally the magic does not work for animals it would seem that cosmic fate has granted them the ability to try and return their former companion and pet back to the party.
With the spell cast, Kurgan does indeed return, however with the fickleness of reincarnation he does not return as a dog. Instead a small dog-faced man, covered in hair and with a bad temperament now seems to haunt Crownfall Keep. Kurgan returned as a domovoy, a house spirit, and now protects and watches over his masters' new house in the valley outside of Stonehell, growling and throwing pots at anyone who does not keep the place clean and does not leave out sufficient offerings of dog food.
Tiny Tina and Jug Go on a Date
Jug, the young man from one of Zorb's nearby villages, has been with the Crownless Company almost from the start. He was, originally, hired to look after the newly formed Crownfall Keep and soon became caretaker of the place, along with his trio of giant toads.
Months of coaching and help from Tina the Titanic, Tiny Tina and other characters, eventually pay off though. Jug, until that point an absolute weenie of a man, soon grows more confident in his own abilities and in himself, a change which in turn also seems to affect how his giant toads treat him, following his commands with a lot more eagerness.
That change in attitude does not go unnoticed too. Tiny Tina and Jug soon find themselves spending time together between various tasks at the keep, and they grow to like each other a lot. With the group taking a month off from dungeon delving, the two decide to go on a date. Their initial plan, a visit to a nearby mountain lake with a cove, secreted among the jagged hills of the region.
The romantic location, unfortunately, turns out to be a bit of an inconvenience as an ogre had decided to visit the lake as well, however between the two of them (and Jug's toads) they take down the beast. In celebration for their victory, Jug invites Whitney (Tiny Tina's actual name, which her boss refuses to use on principle) back to his home village, which is having a celebration and a village dance.
That one turns out much better, with Jug turning heads back home from those who knew him as a squeaky voice twirp. The young couple also spend a few days in Jug's home, with Whitney being introduced to his mother, who is delighted to see how far her son has come (that and also that he's not gotten himself killed), and soon seems to embrace the diminutive cleric as a daughter and part of her family.
Encounter with The Masters
While the Crownless Company themselves focused on other tasks, it does not mean other parties and adventurers do not still delve within the bowels of Stonehell. In fact with the more direct routes to the deeper floors of the dungeon, adventuring parties would likely have an easier time getting to more unexplored areas too, not just the Crownless Company themselves.
However, the lingering danger of the hobgoblin invasion force and their masters soon comes to a head with some of the adventuring parties meeting face to face with said Masters.
The elves that people encounter appear to be hunters, armed with long and deadly rifles and followed by packs of strange elven hounds - hairless beings dressed in spiked suits with vicious bites. It would appear the elves are not so much an invading army, as coming on a safari or hunting trip.
A group that calls themselves The Big Boys brings back quite an interesting bit of intel, overheard by sneaking up on some of the elves. It would appear they are not in this dimension to simply kill things, but also specifically to bring back live pray as well. They hear mention of looking for strong and able bodied males, and discontent among the elves that the population on floor 2 (clearly meaning the inmates that now reside in Tally Town) seems to have left, and are not the easy pickings the elves had hoped for.
Notes and Observations
So yeah, taking a break from the campaign definitely did me good. While I have done everything i can in The Dungeon Game to make this campaign be something that can last for the rest of 2026 and potentially beyond, such as removing any real overland elements, minimizing faction play and reactivity within the dungeon, doing less and less restocking and so on, the week to week running of the game is still something that tends to overwhelm me, even if I enjoy having a weekly game to run.
The things that I listed above very much have come from things my players have wanted to do. Telperion's player has always wanted to play a lich of some kind, even in previous campaigns of mine, and so we sat down and ironed out what exactly that even means and looks like, and came up with some general guidelines on what being undead and a lich actually means for the PC and I just let him...do that with some money spent for magical ingredients. I Mean this is what the spell Magic Jar basically does already after all.
Tina's player has really taken a liking to messing with the dungeon itself as a part of her domain play, and honestly I think there's a lot of unexplored and interesting potential there especially in the context of a megadungeon campaign such as this one. After all, if the dungeon itself is going to be the sustained focus of play, it would seem logical to also make it the focus of domain play and having the players simply establish themselves as more and more of an actual force within the dungeon itself, rather than simple outsiders delving into it and returning back to the surface.
This was something I had hopes to eventually do in my Zandan campaign, but that never materialized due to the early ending of that campaign.
Kurgan being reincarnated was something my players have wanted to do for a while, and while Reincarnation should not work for non-humanoid characters, I came to the conclusion that it's funnier if it did, so I wrote up a quick and dirty reincarnation procedure for that and, of course, once you put something on a table it will inevitably be the thing that happens and we ended up rolling on Chris Kutalik's wonderfully goofy Hill Cantons reincarnation chart. This is how the former wardog now became a domovoy, honestly a very shockingly appropriate transformation for it.
And speaking of transformations - Jug, my boy! This character was originally a jokey follower from a campaign we played with my partners and some friends back in the US, playing through The Incandescent Grottoes. Jug (who's name is pronounced Yoog, but everyone except the party kept calling "jug") was a weedy shrimp of a boy that the party paid to watch their stuff as they went into the dungeon, and who eventually ended up having a possession of a magical bangle that gave him authority and control over frogs, which is how he ended up with a gaggle of giant toads from that dungeon.
When I needed interesting NPC recruits and followers to put in my current campaign I pulled from previous hirelings from other games, former PCs of various people I've played with, and Jug was a great addition to that. And now, finally, years after he originally was conceived he managed to escape his permanent dork status, becoming a competent young man (currently being effectively a level 1 Houndmaster, but using toads instead of dogs) and as a result he even got the girl!
All in all, I am looking forward to going back to Stonehell and seeing where things go from here, and how much we get done in the following months before the end of 2026.