One thing I wanted when I revamped the original draft of Ruins of Castle Gygar for OSE was to make sure there was enough treasure to get to level 9. Level 9 is “name level,” the level when all classes officially become “their class.” (Up until level 9, a fighter isn’t even a fighter, they’re all sorts of other things.) They also strictly speaking can’t start a stronghold or really enter domain play. I wanted my dungeon to be enough to get a fighter up to name level.
As I was doing this I started to get discouraged by the huge amounts of treasure I was writing in my dungeon. Part of this is that somewhere I had done some math wrong. I think I treated each level as noncumulative, meaning I’d put 2000 gold to get to level 2–no issue there–but then put 4000 gold to get to level 3. You can immediately see why this is a problem because, having 2000xp already, you only need another 2000 to get to a total of 4000xp to get to level 3. Adding in that treasure needed to be divisible by 4 (an assumed party amount) and I was fucking putting like 240,000gp in a single room. Sorry–that sounded too stupid, so I set about doing something about it.
Even after correcting for my maths error it seemed like way too much. I was already putting together a full bestiary for the dungeon, meaning one wouldn’t need to rely on OSE or another retroclone for their monster needs. Might as well alter the XP given for monsters–my design sensibility is admittedly a little more monster-fighty than most others in the space. I’ve had a blast in Luke Gearing’s OD&D game where we get awarded 100xp per monster hit die–so I used that as the baseline for establishing all monster XP.
So:
- I counted the monster XP up in every room of the dungeon.
- I figured out my expected XP per level to get a Fighter to the expected levels I wanted them to be, character level 9 at dungeon level 12. (This required a separate spreadsheet that basically was divided into like 128 rows and was not particularly fun to do or look at.)
- I counted how many rooms were to contain treasure.
- I took the expected XP per level, subtracted the given monster XP, leaving the treasure per level value. I divided that by how many rooms contained treasure. (I obviously did not include any rooms that only contained magic items.) This gave me the Treasure Per Room value, which I used as a guideline for distributing my treasure.
- Once I fully distributed the treasure in a way that made sense and was close to my guidelines, I added that up for Current Treasure Value.
- I added Current Treasure Value and Monster XP and divided that by 4 to get the amount of XP a fighter would have at the end of the dungeon level if they did everything. (I also added the row above in Cumulative Fighter XP to uh, make sure it was cumulative.)
As you can see, it was a lot of work, but it all is right there in black and white. The spreadsheet works.
So that’s how I got the numbers that are in the book. If you’re a B/X traditionalist and don’t want to award that much XP for monsters, then the amount you need to redistribute throughout the level is right there in the column named “Monster XP.” Take that, divide it by the number of Treasure Rooms, add that much to each room that contains GP. There you go! 🙂
Parts of this post were modified from a Castle Gygar Kickstarter update.
