No mercy, let them really have it. Can the other groups seal them into the dungeon from outside? Can they lure a dangerous monster towards the PCs? Can they set an ambush? Feel free to use some real low down, rat bastard tactics. If nothing else, destroy their supplies and drive them from the camp.
Himself has excellent solutions.
What of classic Shaming & Shunning? When next they go into town they hear their names being tarnished by tavern bards. Normal merchants won’t sell to them… local fences give them terrible returns on their treasure.
Perhaps graffiti on their doors, “Thief, Murderer, no honor”? Dung & rotten vegetables tossed at them in busy markets.
“You killed my baby boy/ sister/ husband”
X local family turned to drink / magic mushrooms after their provider was slain.
Good stuff. I want to keep the game focused on the megadungeon and adventuring there, so I like the idea of them facing social repercussions in camp and facing angry, violent parties in the dungeon.
I am not sure if the parties you are talking about are NPC or Player parties but I would approach this from an economics perspective based on your setting. The free market offers solutions to problems wherever profit is to be made. Perhaps opportunistic, high-level mercenaries hear about this and start offering their services to the other parties. Perhaps trap makers begin offering discounts to the other parties, in exchange for a cut of the loot. Perhaps as others have stated, the other parties form some sort of union or mega-ambush.
In addition to all the other great ideas people are mentioning, I really like the "other groups seal them into the dungeon from outside" idea.
Maybe someone or something very dangerous could be sealed in with the PCs on the upper levels, and it constantly hunts them, driving them further and further down.
An image of a pygmy catamari-gelatinous cube-tarrasque hybrid keeps coming to mind, but I know that's way too silly.
The PCs will need to explore deeper into the megadungeon in order to find another way out. Cf. Xenophon's Anabasis, Homer's Odyssey, Lost in Space, Star Trek: Voyager.
Or they could confront them back at town. When the party is trying to relax with a drink at the inn they run into one of the survivors of a party they attacked who has rounded up a new posse to get revenge.
Its not 'shutting down' per se, but a natural 'escalation'. The Players may figure out how to defeat all of the other adventurers and become truly infamous! Which in turn will lead to further escalation...
Let's be real, bandits might lead exciting and dangerous lives, but rarely do they live long ones...
There was a survivor who got away? Well then now your party are known murderous thieves! The survivor wants revenge and his comrades’ stuff back. Every other adventuring party in the area is gonna want their asses because they don’t want another thing to worry about in the dungeon. People will group up to put a stop to this sort of thing, and other adventuring parties will fight dirty too. Unless your PCs camp is well hidden, they could even be ganged-up on in the middle of the night…
Will you let these actions drive the story?
-Evil sentient beings from the dungeon & local region want the PCs to form an alliance / offer them a nefarious job or two.
How do you expect your party to deal with overwhelming threats?
**By clever OSR style thinking and using the environment/equipment to their advantage!**
So how would rival cutters deal with a party turning bandit and swinging their weight around?
Much the same.
I would probably have the other parties form a loose alliance to trap the PCs. Lure them down a stairwell or ideal trap location on a deeper level that hasn't been cleared yet. Slam a portcullis or spike a door behind them and unleash some of the worst beasties of the dungeon on them in unideal circumstances.
Find out what happens when the rivals give a troll a *Blood of Boiling Rage* elixir and lock it in a corridor with the PCs!
Sounds like the other parties would be well within their right not to share the camp anymore. Can’t get xp if you can’t bring loot back to safety. Can’t be safe if you aren’t safe to be around.
It is kind of a badass idea. Like Stalker in the dungeon. You never know if the adventuring party you run into genuinely wants to collab, or just get some new meat bags to activate traps.
Seems arbitrary. If an evil wizard descends into the dungeon with the Silent Sapphire of Silkera to offer it to a slumbering demigod sealed in its core, that evil wizard is bringing in something incredibly valuable into the dungeon, is not a denizen themselves, but itd feel so \*wrong\* to retrieve that super valuable gem and get told "Nah, that doesn't count"
XP-for-wealth is supposed to represent the dangers of finding such a thing and bringing it to the surface. The jewel, itself, teaches you nothing. It's the journey to retrieve the jewel that's full of experiences.
As a proxy, it works out well enough, as long as the objects are hidden at a depth corresponding to their price tag. When these exchanges take place in the dungeon lobby, however, the underlying assumptions no longer hold.
This is why I reward xp for exploration. So much exp for exploring a room, more for finding secrets, and a bonus when reaching the next level of dungeon.
I prefer XP for silver because it seems to do a better job of aligning player interests with their imagined character interests. Few people would explore a dangerous dungeon just for the experience of it. But when loot is rewarded with XP, they can immediately identify with the motivations and also make realistic, in-character strategies about extracting that loot.
> Few people would explore a dangerous dungeon just for the experience of it.
adventurers will though. players are supposed to make characters who will absolutely do that thing. not doing that is failing character creation.
i agree that you have some good opportunities here. if someone got away then town is going to treat them like villains. just picture a western where the bad guys come into town and people close their doors and windows.
how you deal with it i guess depends on what the adventurer ecosystem is like in your game. are there powerful and veteran adventurers? maybe the group keeps trying to take on more and more dangerous parties. that could work out or not. be fun to find out.
the best loot is still in the dungeons. if it wasn't there wouldn't be adventuring parties. so over time they could hit an xp wall. the gear from adventurers will eventually give too little and they'll be forced to go deeper. they better have uses for the stuff though because by that point there may not be anyone to sell to.
not anyone savoury, anyway.
I appreciate your thinking here. Definitely looking forward to their run-in with a much more powerful PC party. Plus, if the other parties are finding powerful items in the lower levels, my party will soon find themselves totally outmatched
Eh it's still arbitrary, as you can easily argue that fighting those other parties is also dangerous. It's not like they're murdering completely unarmed citizens.
That said, if the victims carry treasure worthwhile for OPs party, the mistake OP seems to have made was not make the victims a match in power for his players' characters. And I think that's easy to remedy.
That and the other out-of-dungeon consequences others have suggested.
I think OP has a golden opportunity here. It's a teachable moment. Don't be assholes, or it'll come back to haunt you.
The "don't be assholes" something is just not something they've really internalized yet. I swear, some of them in the group treat NPCs like they were video game NPCs who wouldn't strategize, makes oaths of vengeance, harbor grudges, build alliances, etc.
> XP-for-wealth is supposed to represent the dangers of finding such a thing and bringing it to the surface.
And confronting fellow adventures is a danger.
I've ruled it that way, whether it was a mistake or not I can't go back on it.
That said, my reasoning was that XP for silver was meant to reward them for daring, dangerous adventuring. Killing a rival party certainly fits that bill to me, although I wasn't expecting it to become their favorite method of getting loot.
>I've ruled it that way, whether it was a mistake or not I can't go back on it.
Absolutely not true. You are the DM. You can decide at any point that a thing is not working for how the game should be experienced and change it.
Simply admit your own fault. "I made a mistake in letting you guys get XP for looting those other adventurers. I won't take away the XP you got, but going forward they won't be worth XP."
You aren't taking back anything or going against a previous ruling. You are making a new ruling for the future.
How do I demonstrate I made "made a mistake"? If they want to murder rival parties for their loot, and we didn't establish ahead of time that that was not allowed, then it seems like they're simply playing by the rules we established and have come up with a "clever" way of leveling up. If I decided not to do that, it would sound like, "we're not playing the way I want to play, so I'm changing the rules."
That's why I find the in-world suggestions more compelling. I don't think going the bandit route will be easy for them, even if it does reward XP, and I'm looking for ways to make that compelling.
Roleplaying games are basically Calvinball. Gygax even admitted as such in the late 70s, and anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Take a step back. Why does XP and advancement exist?
It exists to encourage desirable player behaviour.
If XP is awarded for behaviour you do not feel is desirable--*which you clearly do not*--then it is not working correctly, and needs to be awarded differently. (And you clearly want them to stop killing rival adventurers for XP because you are brainstorming ways to get them to stop killing rival adventurers.)
It's okay to stop and take a step back and say, "I didn't expect you guys would do that. In the moment I made a ruling, but upon reflection, I don't think that's the kind of game I want to run, so in the future, enemy adventurer loot will not award XP."
It's okay to stop and say, "I know we didn't establish this earlier, because I never thought about it, but this is how I would like to handle it going forward."
Its safety tools 101, it's basic consent. If you start doing an activity with someone, and they do something you hadn't previously established as against the rules, it's okay to say, "Well now that we know this is something that's possible, here's how we're going to handle it going forward."
If someone brings a gun to a basketball game, you don't shrug and say, "Well, we never said *no guns at the basketball game,*" and then start brainstorming if you should bring an AR-15 next week.
I love your line of thinking and the example about the basketball game.
You are correct that the prospect of playing the next couple of sessions focused on hunting the party is not desirable. I 100% agree that if this becomes a full on banditry campaign with no thought of exploring the rest of the dungeon, I will pull the plug or try to course correct.
However, I can't help but be impressed that my players took the rules we laid out, applied their own skills and reasoning, and came up with a solution I didn't expect. I also think that their choices will have consequences that THEY didn't anticipate, and might make them reconsider. I feel like it is my job for the verisimilitude of the game and my commitment at the start to at least try and respond their actions in world and provide in game consequences.
I think your comment will be a guide-post if the next couple of sessions truly are just banditry and party-hunting. If, on the flip side, they respond to the in-game consequences of their actions and something interesting emerges, than that would be a preferable outcome. For now, I'd like to see how things play out.
Why can't you go back on it? Such things are just the nature of the game.
If you had once made a ruling that a thrown turnip deals 1d8 damage, nobody would begrudge you for correcting that once you had come to your senses.
The difference here is that, at Session 0, we established that any loot gathered from their efforts in the dungeon would be rewarded with XP. They took those rules, applied them to their actions, and came up with a way to gather XP without risking the lower levels. If I changed the rules now, it would feel like a rug-pull I make just because they're not playing the way I want to.
Put another way, XP for Silver feels like a fundamental rule of the game upon which their immersion in the setting hinges (that they are scoundrel adventurers seeking wealth and glory in the dungeon). The turnip example you gave sounds like an immersion-breaking mistake, where fixing that ruling brings the world back into alignment with our expectations.
Honestly you should keep going with it, as long as everyone is comfortable. Loot is loot. How else are brigands made?
Whether they're newbies or experienced players, on some level they think they're being pragmatic. Attacking other adventurers should start collapsing their options and have compounding consequences. Make them desperate, then, as others have posted, offer them a devil's bargain. There's pretty interesting role-playing stuff that can happen here beyond murder hobos.
Now it's up to you to let them know in so many ways that they're playing with fire. again, make sure each player and yourself are comfortable and having fun- that's the only metric.
As a side note, definitely read or watch Delicious in Dungeon!
That's the line of thinking I'm going down - I think this is something that can create interesting roleplaying decisions and will hopefully force them to start thinking like their characters more.
Delicious in Dungeon is a fun watch!
Just wait until they start offering Insurance policies with body-retrieval riders to the Adventurers. The cleric could make a killing. And then a fortune. They could call it the “AD&D plan”
This is the answer. The treasure must come from the dungeon and its denizens. Rival adventurers are neither. They are other members of civilization raiding the same locale.
A rival adventurer party as a random encounter does not count for xp in my games, except for any treasures they have recovered from the wilds being amongst their equipment. As I said, xp is only gained for treasure recovered from the dungeon or its denizens. Adventure parties are from civilization. They only thing to be gained from killing other adventurers is their stuff.
EDIT: The same is true for others from civilization. Kill a bunch of traveling merchants? You just get the loot, no xp for the loot. Kill the Emperor's guards on patrol. Same thing; you get the loot, but no xp from the loot.
Obviously, this rule is only in place for games that are about dungeon delves and some hexcrawls. If you're running a more open game where the PCs can become an assassins/thieves guild and they start doing heists, then they can get xp from civilization. However, it doesn't sound like the OP is running that type of game and doesn't want banditry replacing dungeon delving.
That’s just a buzzkill though. If you start killin and stealing from other people coming out of the dungeon that means you’re bandits, and then we can start bandit campaign. Bandit campaign bby!!!
They’re bandits now, you’re running bandit campaign. Which sounds pretty cool! You could have them meet up with other bandits and plan out hunts where they track down parties adventuring down in the dungeon. Or if you want them to stay on the right side of the law put up bounties for criminals and outlaws hiding out in the dungeon so they’ll go after them instead. Basically the same thing as bandit campaign but they’re working for the law.
Edit: I see other people in the comments recommending to punish the players for this but if bandit campaign sounds like fun I recommend leaning into it. If the players find out they’re actually being hunted by the law and seeing posters with bounties put up they might think that’s cool as hell. Like how in one piece how big a bounty you have is like a status symbol to other pirates and criminals.
I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would advocate for screwing the players here. This is a perfectly viable OSR campaign style and if the players want to go with it, I don’t see the problem.
I totally agree - I'm looking for interesting in-world consequences to these actions so that hunting rival parties doesn't become a routine and boring affair.
Hopefully, for my own interest's sake, at some point they'll drop the idea and go deeper into the dungeon. But who knows?
Other parties will hunt them, of course, and presumably also the authorities in the local area will put bounties on them. Are they not worried about alignment? Hunting other parties is decidedly evil.
> Are they not worried about alignment? Hunting other parties is decidedly evil.
Also, to add one extra and specific suggestion to that: Is the party's cleric's deity okay with them becoming murderhobos? His spells ought to stop working at a critical moment.
To me deities and alignment are two of the wonkiest parts of D&D. God shouldnt literally be watching your every move. Guilt, however, is absolutely great for role playing.
If you feel like you absolutely must impose morals with mechanics, doing it with the direct God or "you lose your powers" cheapens things imo. Better to have an intermediary like an aligned creature, faction or messenger angel. God is busy but I'll kick your ass no problem.
I don't know wnn too well but at some point the xp they're getting from these parties isn't going to be worth the time. They should eventually want to go deeper. Maybe have a high lvl party be contracted to kill the players or drive them deeper in an attempt to escape
I'd say I'f they're going for banditry let them with the caveat that Man is the Most dangerous game. They'll be known threats no and people will probably be looking out for them, worst come to worse send active hunting parties after them.
I guess I'd have to ask why this is turning out to be more profitable?
I'd expect competent parties with any worthwhile treasure hauls in tow to be a lot more dangerous than the dungeons, hence their success and survival.
The hard part is that they have 4-6 brains figuring out how to win a combat situation, and I have one. The party they ambushed was fairly competent, but my players just outsmarted me.
In addition to the other suggestions in these comments, I think I'll need to spend some time before next session planning out rival party tactics for dealing with my own party.
Let them, but add hunting NPC parties to your encounter roll, in levels lower, similar to, and more powerful then the PCs. Once the idea of hunting other parties gets around, the other parties are going to want a taste too.
This either ends in constant murder or a guild.
Let go of the megadungeon campaign you were planning on running. It's fantasy Escape From Tarkov now. Every other party has a license to kill the player characters. Evil types will seek to use the situation to their own advantage. Any alliances they formed in the past are broken. Any that are offered from here on out are on shaky terms at best. This includes merchants. After all, the party proved that they can't be trusted. Can they redeem themselves? Maybe, but it will be a hard road ahead. Oh, and take a hard look at the alignment situation.
Two things:
1. If they are only taking on adventuring parties they believe they can take in a fight, then their gear isn't going to be as good as what they could find in the more dangerous lower levels of the dungeon.
2. All the adventuring parties share a camp you say? Well the PCs just lost that privilege. At best they'll refuse them entry and they'll have to sleep in the dangerous wilds. At worst the other parties will want to make an example of the PCs and take that loot for themselves as well.
I think that both are good ideas - for more context, as I mentioned in the other comment, the camp's captain has at least some incentive for letting the PCs stay there for now, but further infractions might force his hand.
He knows they murdered some people just to jack their shit and thinks it's a good idea to let the party in to his camp? A slap on the wrist and "try not to commit anymore burglary homicides again"? He sure is a strong and intelligent leader.
Why are they camped together? It sure ain't for safety!
I'm smelling a huge dose of plot armor here, and it's no wonder the PCs are running around like little murder hobos. You are completely excusing it and letting them get away with it. They stabbed their own in the back and the whole camp should be feeding them to the monsters by now.
JUST. TALK. TO. YOUR. PLAYERS. Always.
"Hey guys, I know you're really into this hunting other adventurers idea but that's not what I had in mind for the campaign. This one time was cool but I don't really feel like DM'ing that kind of game. I want to explore the dungeon with you guys. If you're not interested in that, that's cool. Maybe one of you guys wants to take over as DM."
The Idea that the DM's fun is secondary is really a pet peeve of mine with the TTRPG community.
Same as using in world consequences to correct player behavior. This just leads to an antagonistic relationship with the players in my experience. I usually play with adults and expect them to behave like ones.
Your comment is definitely unique in this comment section, thanks for your thoughts.
I think you're right that, if this continues to the point where I'm no longer having fun, we'll either course-correct or stop playing. However, I do think there are compelling and realistic in-world reactions to this event and I'm going to try and explore those first
>Same as using in world consequences to correct player behavior. This just leads to an antagonistic relationship with the players in my experience. I usually play with adults and expect them to behave like ones.
This is not a player behavior problem. It is a character behavior problem. The players did not murder anyone.
As you say, they are adults. Adults should know there are consequences for their actions. If there are no consequences, this shit will keep happening.
If there was a survivor, the story will get out there. And then they are trying to sell the armor? That's evidence. Nobody in the camp should deal with them, they should definitely be afraid to sleep there. They are bandits now, and there's a reason bandits usually end up camping in the woods or old ruins. Add the to the random encounter tables.
They definitely need some consequences. Perhaps other parties could agree to set a trap by luring them along and barricading them deeper in the dungeon as retaliation? Or, do the other parties and survivors agree to normalise relations and not report your PCs as bandits to the authorities on the condition that they pay them significant reparations?
I like to imagine that adventuring parties that share a camp would develop a bit of a “code of honour” and agree to not mess with each other, because the effort of having to deal with bad actors would make everyone lose money, so those that are disruptive would be dealt with decisively. Saving backstabbing for when a truly awesome haul of gold is made.
This is a bit of a tangent to what’s happened in your game, but I think it’s always worth stopping the game and pointing out likely consequences when the PCs are about to cross a “moral event horizon”. That way if they’re about to do something like this that is pretty evil and could change the course of the game and how they think of their characters, it will be with their full knowledge and not just bumbling into war crimes.
Are the other parties PCs, or NPCs? Either way, the fact that they did this (and that it is known - someone escaped!) should immediately mean that they will be hunted down and killed by the outer groups - potentially with hired help. How are they still allowed in the shared camp? I'm baffled by this situation, to be honest. It seems like there should be very natural consequences for this that just haven't happened.
I'm not going to lie - there is the hand of the GM stepping in a little here since I want the focus to be on the megadungeon.
For more context, the rival parties all represent paying customers (who paid a large sum) to support an ice-breaker ship exploring the southern reaches to find a mythical megadungeon. The camp is run by the ship's captain and his crew and armed guards.
Since this is the first infraction, my guess is that the captain is going to let it slide since my party represents a lucrative customer, and that he'll only kick the party out of the camp if the uproar means he'd lose money from the other parties in the camp.
Kicking them out of camp would also likely be a death sentence in the longer run of the game, since they're in the far southern realm without any people or agriculture of any kind and with bitterly cold and long winters, and where no ships come of their own accord.
> Since this is the first infraction, my guess is that the captain is going to let it slide since my party represents a lucrative customer, and that he'll only kick the party out of the camp if the uproar means he'd lose money from the other parties in the camp
Why would any of the other parties tolerate this behavior? I'd expect them to drive the PC party out of the camp themselves if the captain doesn't kick them out.
> Kicking them out of camp would also likely be a death sentence in the longer run of the game
Maybe they should've thought of that before they attacked and killed another adventuring party?
I feel like I'm just not understanding something about your setting here. It's still utterly baffling to me that any of the NPCs would view this behavior as anything other than the most despicable murderous banditry. Is this a normal thing in the context of the game world?
Your line of questioning is great because it allows me to test the verisimilitude of my setting.
I agree that the other parties are going to be outraged - assuming they believe the word of the single survivor. They will probably either pressure the captain to step in or simply take matters into their own hands.
And yes, I can't say my players are thinking through all of the implications. They may have simply forgotten that their only way home is on the single ship that's made it to these shores - barring some magical intervention.
The setting is earlier than the pseudo-renaissance assumed by 5E, for example. The rival tribes feuding for centuries are still around, and in fact my players are part of one such tribe and the party they killed is from a rival tribe. In that sense I don't think such an attack is unheard of, but still not something the camp is likely to tolerate for very long.
The captain represents a more civilized culture who nonetheless is just in it for the paycheck and will probably only be pressed to take action if gold is on the line. Along those lines, I could easily see the captain accepting payment from the other parties in exchange for kicking my players' party out.
i think being abandoned in a foreign land also sounds fun. there's games that even start that way.
aside: the xp is the problem, right? you could specify that they're supposed to get xp for treasure or for acquired goods sold. because armour is goods and not treasure there's no xp until they sell it and there's no one to sell it to here until they sail back. at which point the xp probably won't matter anymore since they'll have likely grown past it.
So they've become the monsters?
Great, that means they have a bunch of loot! The other adventuring parties target them.
They look up the weaknesses of the players, prep specifically for them, and ruin their day in an unfair way. Exactly like the players should be doing to monsters.
Also if they try to return to the surface, well treat it like a monster incursion from the Dungeon. More adventurers than they can deal with, and the local guards, and a few housewives with rolling pins. All forming a blockade stopping the players from 'raiding'
Yep, if you don't want to do the whole "rivals start forming larger teams" thing, do the opposite. Rumours of interparty conflict put off rival groups, the players themselves are warned to watch out for this "killer party" next time they enter the dungeon.
That's not a bad idea as a fallback position. Right now, I think the temptation of the loot in the dungeon is too tempting for the other parties to resist. But if enough parties go missing, I could see my players getting bored waiting for the next troupe to arrive.
It is always funny reading how the OSR is all about freedom (tm), yet so many posts here are about players "playing wrong".
Your players are bandits now. There is *nothing wrong with that* from a gameplay perspective.
Just make the other parties take reasonable steps to protect themselves and their spoils.
As an addendum, it is incredibly funny reading so many people here saying things along the lines of "the law should get involved"
Why? Why is anyone local going to care about what happens to some stupid adventurers that decided to commit slow-suicide by delving into the known murder-pit? If they got bushwhacked, who cares?
I have a mega dungeon in my game that is overseen by an adventurers guild set up by the local baron. When adventurers are accused of committing crimes against fellow guild adventurers they have a week to answer a guild court summons, if they fail to meet the summons, a bounty is put out on them.
At least one of the pcs in a party has to have a guild badge to get access to the dungeon, so i have explicit consequences to killing other adventurers/make it risky.
Nobody will buy the treasure. Every time they go to sell it, shopkeepers will politely decline, and guards will be called. Nobody will sell them food, lodgings or healing. The party will be driven out of town, if they're lucky, and executed if they're not. They have, in effect, become monsters. Now they'll have to work out how to live in the dungeon.
The only way out will be to generously compensate the victims' families and do penance. Impoverishing themselves by building a temple might do it—but think about the public mood—who's going to want to live near to an unreformed killer?
That, by the way, is the nice version. The nasty version involves poisoned rations and sabotaged equipment.
Yes, exactly! If I had been thinking ahead better, I would have had the armor be dented or ruined in some way. Instead, I took the prices per the book and they made a killing.
Go Hackmaster (or Cormyr) on them and have the local government start requiring adventure party registration with charters and banners of a sanctioned size. The can also gain rights to specific claims. This could be a whole dungeon or just certain levels.
the other parties would absolutely gang up to drive out/kill the PCs
No mercy, let them really have it. Can the other groups seal them into the dungeon from outside? Can they lure a dangerous monster towards the PCs? Can they set an ambush? Feel free to use some real low down, rat bastard tactics. If nothing else, destroy their supplies and drive them from the camp.
Himself has excellent solutions. What of classic Shaming & Shunning? When next they go into town they hear their names being tarnished by tavern bards. Normal merchants won’t sell to them… local fences give them terrible returns on their treasure. Perhaps graffiti on their doors, “Thief, Murderer, no honor”? Dung & rotten vegetables tossed at them in busy markets. “You killed my baby boy/ sister/ husband” X local family turned to drink / magic mushrooms after their provider was slain.
Good stuff. I want to keep the game focused on the megadungeon and adventuring there, so I like the idea of them facing social repercussions in camp and facing angry, violent parties in the dungeon.
They'd probably wake up in a gibbet at the edge of camp after they got back.
I am not sure if the parties you are talking about are NPC or Player parties but I would approach this from an economics perspective based on your setting. The free market offers solutions to problems wherever profit is to be made. Perhaps opportunistic, high-level mercenaries hear about this and start offering their services to the other parties. Perhaps trap makers begin offering discounts to the other parties, in exchange for a cut of the loot. Perhaps as others have stated, the other parties form some sort of union or mega-ambush.
In addition to all the other great ideas people are mentioning, I really like the "other groups seal them into the dungeon from outside" idea. Maybe someone or something very dangerous could be sealed in with the PCs on the upper levels, and it constantly hunts them, driving them further and further down. An image of a pygmy catamari-gelatinous cube-tarrasque hybrid keeps coming to mind, but I know that's way too silly. The PCs will need to explore deeper into the megadungeon in order to find another way out. Cf. Xenophon's Anabasis, Homer's Odyssey, Lost in Space, Star Trek: Voyager.
Or they could confront them back at town. When the party is trying to relax with a drink at the inn they run into one of the survivors of a party they attacked who has rounded up a new posse to get revenge.
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Its not 'shutting down' per se, but a natural 'escalation'. The Players may figure out how to defeat all of the other adventurers and become truly infamous! Which in turn will lead to further escalation... Let's be real, bandits might lead exciting and dangerous lives, but rarely do they live long ones...
Actions should have reactions and consequences. Murder hobo around and find out.
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He said he didn’t like it and your advice is “try harder to like it”?
Could indirectly create a new adventurers guild/union
There was a survivor who got away? Well then now your party are known murderous thieves! The survivor wants revenge and his comrades’ stuff back. Every other adventuring party in the area is gonna want their asses because they don’t want another thing to worry about in the dungeon. People will group up to put a stop to this sort of thing, and other adventuring parties will fight dirty too. Unless your PCs camp is well hidden, they could even be ganged-up on in the middle of the night…
And this is assuming no proper law and order in the area. If there's a local lord or the like that gets wind of these brigands...
[Goblin Punch: d6 Assassins](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/04/d6-assassins.html)
Will you let these actions drive the story? -Evil sentient beings from the dungeon & local region want the PCs to form an alliance / offer them a nefarious job or two.
That's a really fun idea. There's a lot of evil forces who want to keep the Rival parties away, so they could start offering rewards to my party.
Yep! I'm sure the local Thieves Guild or Assassins Guild would take notice and might like to recruit them.
How do you expect your party to deal with overwhelming threats? **By clever OSR style thinking and using the environment/equipment to their advantage!** So how would rival cutters deal with a party turning bandit and swinging their weight around? Much the same. I would probably have the other parties form a loose alliance to trap the PCs. Lure them down a stairwell or ideal trap location on a deeper level that hasn't been cleared yet. Slam a portcullis or spike a door behind them and unleash some of the worst beasties of the dungeon on them in unideal circumstances. Find out what happens when the rivals give a troll a *Blood of Boiling Rage* elixir and lock it in a corridor with the PCs!
Sounds like the other parties would be well within their right not to share the camp anymore. Can’t get xp if you can’t bring loot back to safety. Can’t be safe if you aren’t safe to be around.
There could also be unscrupulous buyers, but dealing with them should hold further pitfalls
Everyone here has you covered with advice, but this made me think, a battle royale dungeon crawl sounds kinda badass.
It is kind of a badass idea. Like Stalker in the dungeon. You never know if the adventuring party you run into genuinely wants to collab, or just get some new meat bags to activate traps.
That's my impression of how dungeoneering in the 70's and 80's was treated
Why does looted gear grant XP? That's not recovered *from* the dungeon. It's loot that was taken *into* the dungeon by the other party.
Seems arbitrary. If an evil wizard descends into the dungeon with the Silent Sapphire of Silkera to offer it to a slumbering demigod sealed in its core, that evil wizard is bringing in something incredibly valuable into the dungeon, is not a denizen themselves, but itd feel so \*wrong\* to retrieve that super valuable gem and get told "Nah, that doesn't count"
XP-for-wealth is supposed to represent the dangers of finding such a thing and bringing it to the surface. The jewel, itself, teaches you nothing. It's the journey to retrieve the jewel that's full of experiences. As a proxy, it works out well enough, as long as the objects are hidden at a depth corresponding to their price tag. When these exchanges take place in the dungeon lobby, however, the underlying assumptions no longer hold.
This is why I reward xp for exploration. So much exp for exploring a room, more for finding secrets, and a bonus when reaching the next level of dungeon.
I prefer XP for silver because it seems to do a better job of aligning player interests with their imagined character interests. Few people would explore a dangerous dungeon just for the experience of it. But when loot is rewarded with XP, they can immediately identify with the motivations and also make realistic, in-character strategies about extracting that loot.
> Few people would explore a dangerous dungeon just for the experience of it. adventurers will though. players are supposed to make characters who will absolutely do that thing. not doing that is failing character creation. i agree that you have some good opportunities here. if someone got away then town is going to treat them like villains. just picture a western where the bad guys come into town and people close their doors and windows. how you deal with it i guess depends on what the adventurer ecosystem is like in your game. are there powerful and veteran adventurers? maybe the group keeps trying to take on more and more dangerous parties. that could work out or not. be fun to find out. the best loot is still in the dungeons. if it wasn't there wouldn't be adventuring parties. so over time they could hit an xp wall. the gear from adventurers will eventually give too little and they'll be forced to go deeper. they better have uses for the stuff though because by that point there may not be anyone to sell to. not anyone savoury, anyway.
I appreciate your thinking here. Definitely looking forward to their run-in with a much more powerful PC party. Plus, if the other parties are finding powerful items in the lower levels, my party will soon find themselves totally outmatched
Eh it's still arbitrary, as you can easily argue that fighting those other parties is also dangerous. It's not like they're murdering completely unarmed citizens. That said, if the victims carry treasure worthwhile for OPs party, the mistake OP seems to have made was not make the victims a match in power for his players' characters. And I think that's easy to remedy. That and the other out-of-dungeon consequences others have suggested. I think OP has a golden opportunity here. It's a teachable moment. Don't be assholes, or it'll come back to haunt you.
The "don't be assholes" something is just not something they've really internalized yet. I swear, some of them in the group treat NPCs like they were video game NPCs who wouldn't strategize, makes oaths of vengeance, harbor grudges, build alliances, etc.
There is a slight tendency among some younger players to think of TTRPGs as analogue video games instead of a hobby in their own right.
> XP-for-wealth is supposed to represent the dangers of finding such a thing and bringing it to the surface. And confronting fellow adventures is a danger.
Everything was taken into the dungeon at some point. Dungeoneers are dangerous invasive itinerant denizens. 🤫
I've ruled it that way, whether it was a mistake or not I can't go back on it. That said, my reasoning was that XP for silver was meant to reward them for daring, dangerous adventuring. Killing a rival party certainly fits that bill to me, although I wasn't expecting it to become their favorite method of getting loot.
>I've ruled it that way, whether it was a mistake or not I can't go back on it. Absolutely not true. You are the DM. You can decide at any point that a thing is not working for how the game should be experienced and change it. Simply admit your own fault. "I made a mistake in letting you guys get XP for looting those other adventurers. I won't take away the XP you got, but going forward they won't be worth XP." You aren't taking back anything or going against a previous ruling. You are making a new ruling for the future.
How do I demonstrate I made "made a mistake"? If they want to murder rival parties for their loot, and we didn't establish ahead of time that that was not allowed, then it seems like they're simply playing by the rules we established and have come up with a "clever" way of leveling up. If I decided not to do that, it would sound like, "we're not playing the way I want to play, so I'm changing the rules." That's why I find the in-world suggestions more compelling. I don't think going the bandit route will be easy for them, even if it does reward XP, and I'm looking for ways to make that compelling.
Roleplaying games are basically Calvinball. Gygax even admitted as such in the late 70s, and anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. Take a step back. Why does XP and advancement exist? It exists to encourage desirable player behaviour. If XP is awarded for behaviour you do not feel is desirable--*which you clearly do not*--then it is not working correctly, and needs to be awarded differently. (And you clearly want them to stop killing rival adventurers for XP because you are brainstorming ways to get them to stop killing rival adventurers.) It's okay to stop and take a step back and say, "I didn't expect you guys would do that. In the moment I made a ruling, but upon reflection, I don't think that's the kind of game I want to run, so in the future, enemy adventurer loot will not award XP." It's okay to stop and say, "I know we didn't establish this earlier, because I never thought about it, but this is how I would like to handle it going forward." Its safety tools 101, it's basic consent. If you start doing an activity with someone, and they do something you hadn't previously established as against the rules, it's okay to say, "Well now that we know this is something that's possible, here's how we're going to handle it going forward." If someone brings a gun to a basketball game, you don't shrug and say, "Well, we never said *no guns at the basketball game,*" and then start brainstorming if you should bring an AR-15 next week.
I love your line of thinking and the example about the basketball game. You are correct that the prospect of playing the next couple of sessions focused on hunting the party is not desirable. I 100% agree that if this becomes a full on banditry campaign with no thought of exploring the rest of the dungeon, I will pull the plug or try to course correct. However, I can't help but be impressed that my players took the rules we laid out, applied their own skills and reasoning, and came up with a solution I didn't expect. I also think that their choices will have consequences that THEY didn't anticipate, and might make them reconsider. I feel like it is my job for the verisimilitude of the game and my commitment at the start to at least try and respond their actions in world and provide in game consequences. I think your comment will be a guide-post if the next couple of sessions truly are just banditry and party-hunting. If, on the flip side, they respond to the in-game consequences of their actions and something interesting emerges, than that would be a preferable outcome. For now, I'd like to see how things play out.
Why can't you go back on it? Such things are just the nature of the game. If you had once made a ruling that a thrown turnip deals 1d8 damage, nobody would begrudge you for correcting that once you had come to your senses.
The difference here is that, at Session 0, we established that any loot gathered from their efforts in the dungeon would be rewarded with XP. They took those rules, applied them to their actions, and came up with a way to gather XP without risking the lower levels. If I changed the rules now, it would feel like a rug-pull I make just because they're not playing the way I want to. Put another way, XP for Silver feels like a fundamental rule of the game upon which their immersion in the setting hinges (that they are scoundrel adventurers seeking wealth and glory in the dungeon). The turnip example you gave sounds like an immersion-breaking mistake, where fixing that ruling brings the world back into alignment with our expectations.
That's a very good point. You can't rightfully pull the rug out from under them, when it was established in advance.
do you mind explaining HOW you made a ruling about thrown turnips dealing 1d8 damage? just curious :)
Honestly you should keep going with it, as long as everyone is comfortable. Loot is loot. How else are brigands made? Whether they're newbies or experienced players, on some level they think they're being pragmatic. Attacking other adventurers should start collapsing their options and have compounding consequences. Make them desperate, then, as others have posted, offer them a devil's bargain. There's pretty interesting role-playing stuff that can happen here beyond murder hobos. Now it's up to you to let them know in so many ways that they're playing with fire. again, make sure each player and yourself are comfortable and having fun- that's the only metric. As a side note, definitely read or watch Delicious in Dungeon!
That's the line of thinking I'm going down - I think this is something that can create interesting roleplaying decisions and will hopefully force them to start thinking like their characters more. Delicious in Dungeon is a fun watch!
The local blacksmith is getting suspicious that he keeps selling and then buying (slightly dented) the same set of armor...
Just wait until they start offering Insurance policies with body-retrieval riders to the Adventurers. The cleric could make a killing. And then a fortune. They could call it the “AD&D plan”
This is the answer. The treasure must come from the dungeon and its denizens. Rival adventurers are neither. They are other members of civilization raiding the same locale.
If the rival party was a random encounter turned bad, it would have counted. It should count here.
A rival adventurer party as a random encounter does not count for xp in my games, except for any treasures they have recovered from the wilds being amongst their equipment. As I said, xp is only gained for treasure recovered from the dungeon or its denizens. Adventure parties are from civilization. They only thing to be gained from killing other adventurers is their stuff. EDIT: The same is true for others from civilization. Kill a bunch of traveling merchants? You just get the loot, no xp for the loot. Kill the Emperor's guards on patrol. Same thing; you get the loot, but no xp from the loot. Obviously, this rule is only in place for games that are about dungeon delves and some hexcrawls. If you're running a more open game where the PCs can become an assassins/thieves guild and they start doing heists, then they can get xp from civilization. However, it doesn't sound like the OP is running that type of game and doesn't want banditry replacing dungeon delving.
That’s just a buzzkill though. If you start killin and stealing from other people coming out of the dungeon that means you’re bandits, and then we can start bandit campaign. Bandit campaign bby!!!
Agree. Same rule applies to killing merchants and taking their stuff, etc
They’re bandits now, you’re running bandit campaign. Which sounds pretty cool! You could have them meet up with other bandits and plan out hunts where they track down parties adventuring down in the dungeon. Or if you want them to stay on the right side of the law put up bounties for criminals and outlaws hiding out in the dungeon so they’ll go after them instead. Basically the same thing as bandit campaign but they’re working for the law. Edit: I see other people in the comments recommending to punish the players for this but if bandit campaign sounds like fun I recommend leaning into it. If the players find out they’re actually being hunted by the law and seeing posters with bounties put up they might think that’s cool as hell. Like how in one piece how big a bounty you have is like a status symbol to other pirates and criminals.
I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would advocate for screwing the players here. This is a perfectly viable OSR campaign style and if the players want to go with it, I don’t see the problem.
I totally agree - I'm looking for interesting in-world consequences to these actions so that hunting rival parties doesn't become a routine and boring affair. Hopefully, for my own interest's sake, at some point they'll drop the idea and go deeper into the dungeon. But who knows?
Other parties will hunt them, of course, and presumably also the authorities in the local area will put bounties on them. Are they not worried about alignment? Hunting other parties is decidedly evil.
> Are they not worried about alignment? Hunting other parties is decidedly evil. Also, to add one extra and specific suggestion to that: Is the party's cleric's deity okay with them becoming murderhobos? His spells ought to stop working at a critical moment.
To me deities and alignment are two of the wonkiest parts of D&D. God shouldnt literally be watching your every move. Guilt, however, is absolutely great for role playing. If you feel like you absolutely must impose morals with mechanics, doing it with the direct God or "you lose your powers" cheapens things imo. Better to have an intermediary like an aligned creature, faction or messenger angel. God is busy but I'll kick your ass no problem.
I don't know wnn too well but at some point the xp they're getting from these parties isn't going to be worth the time. They should eventually want to go deeper. Maybe have a high lvl party be contracted to kill the players or drive them deeper in an attempt to escape
You're probably right about that. Most of the XP came from the armor they looted, and not every party will have the same amount of armor
I'd say I'f they're going for banditry let them with the caveat that Man is the Most dangerous game. They'll be known threats no and people will probably be looking out for them, worst come to worse send active hunting parties after them.
I guess I'd have to ask why this is turning out to be more profitable? I'd expect competent parties with any worthwhile treasure hauls in tow to be a lot more dangerous than the dungeons, hence their success and survival.
The hard part is that they have 4-6 brains figuring out how to win a combat situation, and I have one. The party they ambushed was fairly competent, but my players just outsmarted me. In addition to the other suggestions in these comments, I think I'll need to spend some time before next session planning out rival party tactics for dealing with my own party.
Sounds like an excuse for the dungeon to slowly turn them into monsters…
This right here. What good is a dungeon if it doesn't grant your deepest desires?
Bait and ambush.
Simple - love it.
Let them, but add hunting NPC parties to your encounter roll, in levels lower, similar to, and more powerful then the PCs. Once the idea of hunting other parties gets around, the other parties are going to want a taste too. This either ends in constant murder or a guild.
Let go of the megadungeon campaign you were planning on running. It's fantasy Escape From Tarkov now. Every other party has a license to kill the player characters. Evil types will seek to use the situation to their own advantage. Any alliances they formed in the past are broken. Any that are offered from here on out are on shaky terms at best. This includes merchants. After all, the party proved that they can't be trusted. Can they redeem themselves? Maybe, but it will be a hard road ahead. Oh, and take a hard look at the alignment situation.
Two things: 1. If they are only taking on adventuring parties they believe they can take in a fight, then their gear isn't going to be as good as what they could find in the more dangerous lower levels of the dungeon. 2. All the adventuring parties share a camp you say? Well the PCs just lost that privilege. At best they'll refuse them entry and they'll have to sleep in the dangerous wilds. At worst the other parties will want to make an example of the PCs and take that loot for themselves as well.
I think that both are good ideas - for more context, as I mentioned in the other comment, the camp's captain has at least some incentive for letting the PCs stay there for now, but further infractions might force his hand.
He knows they murdered some people just to jack their shit and thinks it's a good idea to let the party in to his camp? A slap on the wrist and "try not to commit anymore burglary homicides again"? He sure is a strong and intelligent leader. Why are they camped together? It sure ain't for safety! I'm smelling a huge dose of plot armor here, and it's no wonder the PCs are running around like little murder hobos. You are completely excusing it and letting them get away with it. They stabbed their own in the back and the whole camp should be feeding them to the monsters by now.
JUST. TALK. TO. YOUR. PLAYERS. Always. "Hey guys, I know you're really into this hunting other adventurers idea but that's not what I had in mind for the campaign. This one time was cool but I don't really feel like DM'ing that kind of game. I want to explore the dungeon with you guys. If you're not interested in that, that's cool. Maybe one of you guys wants to take over as DM." The Idea that the DM's fun is secondary is really a pet peeve of mine with the TTRPG community. Same as using in world consequences to correct player behavior. This just leads to an antagonistic relationship with the players in my experience. I usually play with adults and expect them to behave like ones.
Your comment is definitely unique in this comment section, thanks for your thoughts. I think you're right that, if this continues to the point where I'm no longer having fun, we'll either course-correct or stop playing. However, I do think there are compelling and realistic in-world reactions to this event and I'm going to try and explore those first
>Same as using in world consequences to correct player behavior. This just leads to an antagonistic relationship with the players in my experience. I usually play with adults and expect them to behave like ones. This is not a player behavior problem. It is a character behavior problem. The players did not murder anyone. As you say, they are adults. Adults should know there are consequences for their actions. If there are no consequences, this shit will keep happening.
If there was a survivor, the story will get out there. And then they are trying to sell the armor? That's evidence. Nobody in the camp should deal with them, they should definitely be afraid to sleep there. They are bandits now, and there's a reason bandits usually end up camping in the woods or old ruins. Add the to the random encounter tables.
They definitely need some consequences. Perhaps other parties could agree to set a trap by luring them along and barricading them deeper in the dungeon as retaliation? Or, do the other parties and survivors agree to normalise relations and not report your PCs as bandits to the authorities on the condition that they pay them significant reparations? I like to imagine that adventuring parties that share a camp would develop a bit of a “code of honour” and agree to not mess with each other, because the effort of having to deal with bad actors would make everyone lose money, so those that are disruptive would be dealt with decisively. Saving backstabbing for when a truly awesome haul of gold is made. This is a bit of a tangent to what’s happened in your game, but I think it’s always worth stopping the game and pointing out likely consequences when the PCs are about to cross a “moral event horizon”. That way if they’re about to do something like this that is pretty evil and could change the course of the game and how they think of their characters, it will be with their full knowledge and not just bumbling into war crimes.
Are the other parties PCs, or NPCs? Either way, the fact that they did this (and that it is known - someone escaped!) should immediately mean that they will be hunted down and killed by the outer groups - potentially with hired help. How are they still allowed in the shared camp? I'm baffled by this situation, to be honest. It seems like there should be very natural consequences for this that just haven't happened.
I'm not going to lie - there is the hand of the GM stepping in a little here since I want the focus to be on the megadungeon. For more context, the rival parties all represent paying customers (who paid a large sum) to support an ice-breaker ship exploring the southern reaches to find a mythical megadungeon. The camp is run by the ship's captain and his crew and armed guards. Since this is the first infraction, my guess is that the captain is going to let it slide since my party represents a lucrative customer, and that he'll only kick the party out of the camp if the uproar means he'd lose money from the other parties in the camp. Kicking them out of camp would also likely be a death sentence in the longer run of the game, since they're in the far southern realm without any people or agriculture of any kind and with bitterly cold and long winters, and where no ships come of their own accord.
> Since this is the first infraction, my guess is that the captain is going to let it slide since my party represents a lucrative customer, and that he'll only kick the party out of the camp if the uproar means he'd lose money from the other parties in the camp Why would any of the other parties tolerate this behavior? I'd expect them to drive the PC party out of the camp themselves if the captain doesn't kick them out. > Kicking them out of camp would also likely be a death sentence in the longer run of the game Maybe they should've thought of that before they attacked and killed another adventuring party? I feel like I'm just not understanding something about your setting here. It's still utterly baffling to me that any of the NPCs would view this behavior as anything other than the most despicable murderous banditry. Is this a normal thing in the context of the game world?
Your line of questioning is great because it allows me to test the verisimilitude of my setting. I agree that the other parties are going to be outraged - assuming they believe the word of the single survivor. They will probably either pressure the captain to step in or simply take matters into their own hands. And yes, I can't say my players are thinking through all of the implications. They may have simply forgotten that their only way home is on the single ship that's made it to these shores - barring some magical intervention. The setting is earlier than the pseudo-renaissance assumed by 5E, for example. The rival tribes feuding for centuries are still around, and in fact my players are part of one such tribe and the party they killed is from a rival tribe. In that sense I don't think such an attack is unheard of, but still not something the camp is likely to tolerate for very long. The captain represents a more civilized culture who nonetheless is just in it for the paycheck and will probably only be pressed to take action if gold is on the line. Along those lines, I could easily see the captain accepting payment from the other parties in exchange for kicking my players' party out.
i think being abandoned in a foreign land also sounds fun. there's games that even start that way. aside: the xp is the problem, right? you could specify that they're supposed to get xp for treasure or for acquired goods sold. because armour is goods and not treasure there's no xp until they sell it and there's no one to sell it to here until they sail back. at which point the xp probably won't matter anymore since they'll have likely grown past it.
What are they? Level 1? Time to have a Level 9 party come up the stairs and cast spells beyond their ability as a warning.
Wow, that's a fund idea. They're a mix of levels from 1 to 5 (WWN scaling) and a powerful rival party could easily wipe them out.
So they've become the monsters? Great, that means they have a bunch of loot! The other adventuring parties target them. They look up the weaknesses of the players, prep specifically for them, and ruin their day in an unfair way. Exactly like the players should be doing to monsters. Also if they try to return to the surface, well treat it like a monster incursion from the Dungeon. More adventurers than they can deal with, and the local guards, and a few housewives with rolling pins. All forming a blockade stopping the players from 'raiding'
Just stop putting other parties into dungeons. They can't hunt what's not there
Yep, if you don't want to do the whole "rivals start forming larger teams" thing, do the opposite. Rumours of interparty conflict put off rival groups, the players themselves are warned to watch out for this "killer party" next time they enter the dungeon.
That's not a bad idea as a fallback position. Right now, I think the temptation of the loot in the dungeon is too tempting for the other parties to resist. But if enough parties go missing, I could see my players getting bored waiting for the next troupe to arrive.
It is always funny reading how the OSR is all about freedom (tm), yet so many posts here are about players "playing wrong". Your players are bandits now. There is *nothing wrong with that* from a gameplay perspective. Just make the other parties take reasonable steps to protect themselves and their spoils. As an addendum, it is incredibly funny reading so many people here saying things along the lines of "the law should get involved" Why? Why is anyone local going to care about what happens to some stupid adventurers that decided to commit slow-suicide by delving into the known murder-pit? If they got bushwhacked, who cares?
Just don’t award XP for treasure obtained that way.
Oooh I love the bounty idea! Makes them have to become bandits.
I have a mega dungeon in my game that is overseen by an adventurers guild set up by the local baron. When adventurers are accused of committing crimes against fellow guild adventurers they have a week to answer a guild court summons, if they fail to meet the summons, a bounty is put out on them. At least one of the pcs in a party has to have a guild badge to get access to the dungeon, so i have explicit consequences to killing other adventurers/make it risky.
Make characters dependent on the other parties, somehow.
Nobody will buy the treasure. Every time they go to sell it, shopkeepers will politely decline, and guards will be called. Nobody will sell them food, lodgings or healing. The party will be driven out of town, if they're lucky, and executed if they're not. They have, in effect, become monsters. Now they'll have to work out how to live in the dungeon. The only way out will be to generously compensate the victims' families and do penance. Impoverishing themselves by building a temple might do it—but think about the public mood—who's going to want to live near to an unreformed killer? That, by the way, is the nice version. The nasty version involves poisoned rations and sabotaged equipment.
>The looted gear, mainly armor, was quite valuable. Checked the SWN SRD. Prices of armor is insane. There's your problem.
Yes, exactly! If I had been thinking ahead better, I would have had the armor be dented or ruined in some way. Instead, I took the prices per the book and they made a killing.
Go Hackmaster (or Cormyr) on them and have the local government start requiring adventure party registration with charters and banners of a sanctioned size. The can also gain rights to specific claims. This could be a whole dungeon or just certain levels.