Save Your Father From the Whale's Belly

In this Post, I finally describe those Moby-Dick dungeons

Except way more Treasure and Monsters

In order to enter a Sea-Beast one must first find one and there are generally two methods to do so. Summoning a Sea-Beast: By dropping 100 silver worth of blood/entrails and 1000 silver worth of treasure into sea near the whirling straight a Sea-Beast is summoned in 1d4 turns. Entering the Whirling Straight: Make a massive cave complex and populate it with sea monsters, about 2 levels down start flooding it, 3 levels down where you would normally place a dragon/lich/other super high dangerous encounter start placing Sea-Beasts.

Once in the presence of such a creature one either becomes Swallowed by the Sea-Beast or Cuts into the Sea-Beast's flesh making an entrance. If one is swallowed, they enter the Sea-Beast through it's mouth which can be exited out of again. By Cutting into the Sea-Beast's flesh, one enters into a random organ and the musculature plugs the whole in after them.

Sea-Beast Maps/Physiology

Every Sea-Beast has a base structure composed of 8 organs (rooms which the PC's can travel through). There is the Bloody Path and the Bile Path. The Bloody Path is a one-way series of 4 organs which loop back into one another. The Bile Path is a linear series of organs. There are always 3 intersections in the Bloody and Bile Paths. The Throat and Gills have a passage between them, and the Veins have passages to both the Stomach and Bowels. The graphic below should help make things clear.

If the Party chooses to become swallowed by the Sea-Beast, they start in the Mouth, otherwise randomly select a room that isn't a Mouth or Gills Organ and they start there. Once the party is inside, the Sea-Beast simply becomes a dungeon to be plundered. However, the Sea-Beast is not simply a series of 8 rooms, there are more organs.

Creating the Sea-Beast Dungeon

Each Sea-Beast has 1d10 (or more) spare organs/rooms. When creating your Moby-Dick dungeon, you figure out how many extra organs the sea-beast has and then roll on the chart below for what type of organ it is. If the extra organ is a bowel, you attach it to another Bowel Room, otherwise just attach it to a room at random.

Roll	Organ
1-5	Extra Bowels
6	Spare Heart
7	Extra Gills
8	Extra Veins
9	Egg Cavity
10	Air Bladder

For our example lets say we rolled a 5, so we have 5 extra organs. We roll 5d10 and learn our sea-beast has 3 Extra Bowels, 1 Spare Heart, and 1 set of Extra Gills. Below is a graphic showing where we have placed them. And further each room is now numbered as it would be in a normal dungeon map. Now it should be looking a bit more familiar, it's not to scale what so ever though. Room size is listed below, the passage length between adjacent organs is 30ft.

Sea-Beast Organ Contents/Dungeon Room Population

The contents of each room are based on the table below and what kind of organ it is. For each room roll a 1d10 for the contents and then modify based on the organ type.

Roll	Result
1-6	Empty/re-roll (a room is only empty if it is rolled as empty twice)
7-8	Monster
9	Guarded Treasure
10	Treasure

Mouth - Entrance to the Dungeon. Filled with massive teeth, parasites within the beast's maw, and corpses stuck in between the fangs. 25% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 20x20 feet.

Throat - Filled with howling wind, dripping slime, and flotsam stuck in the soft flesh of the throat. 25% chance of the Sea-Beast intelligently communicating with the party. 50% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 20x40 feet.

Gills - Exit out of the Dungeon. Massive bleeding slits from which the outside ocean can be momentarily seen. 0% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 20x20 feet.

Lungs - If torches are lit here, there is a 1d6 + 1 per minute per exposed torch chance of the Sea-Beast violently coughing and spasming. Party takes 1d6 damage and each member must save or be shunted out into the throat of the beast. 100% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 30x30 feet.

Heart - Beating irregularly this amalgam of misshapen tumors sends out a pressure wave to those who stand nearby. All those in a heart room take 1d6 Non-lethal damage every 3 rounds. 0% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 30x30 feet.

Veins - Filled with fluid that snuffs out torches. Speed is reduced to half here. 0% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 100x5 feet.

Basically This Level From Super Mario Land 2

Egg Cavity - Home of a sleeping Fetal Sea-Beast which will fight the party. 50% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 40x40 feet.

Air Bladder - Always empty. 100% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 40x40 feet.

Stomach - Filled with acidic waters which will erode PC possessions. If a PC spends more than 1 turn inside a stomach they must save vs possessions being destroyed. On a successful save only 1 possession lost, while on a failure 1d6+1 possessions are lost. If the PC has less possessions than what is listed they instead take the difference in damage. There is a 25% chance of this organ containing a ship. 25% chance of oxygen inside and roughly 40x60 feet.

Bowels - Rather large and surprisingly dry, these massive caverns are filled with the accumulated debris that the Sea-Beast has consumed over the course of the past years. There will always be treasure inside a bowels organ alongside what ever is rolled on the Room Content Table. There is a 33% chance of this organ containing a ruined ship 50% chance of oxygen inside Roughly 60x90 feet.

*Torches can only be lit in rooms with oxygen and when moving to a room without oxygen, the torch snuffs out in 1d4 minutes.

Monsters in a Room of a Sea-Beast

Roll	Result
1	2d6 Crazed Sailors/Pirates
2	1d4 Giant Tapeworms
3	1d6 Spider/Crab/Crustaceans
4	3d10 Giant Isopods
5	Half-Dead Berserk Whale
6	Dead version of one of the above

Wandering Monsters of a Sea-Beast

Roll	Result
1	Crawling Mechanized Shark
2	Crazed Gyre Islander Trapped
3	Marauding Party of 1d8 Atavistic Merfolk Raiders
4	Swarm of 1d4 Winged Squids
5	2d4 Echindaspawn
6	Ningen Wanderer Trapped Inside

Types of Guarded Treasure in a Sea-Beast

Roll	Result
1-3	Monster Squatting above the Treasure
4	Treasure is CURSED!!! (use your favorite curse table)
5	Treasure is trapped (save or damage/poison)
6	Treasure is wanted by someone else

Types of Monster Squatting above the Treasure

Roll	Result
1	Giant Sea Snake/Eel/Lamprey
2	3d4 Undead Sailors
3	Treasure Chest Mimic
4	Half-Dead Giant Squid
5	4d8 Giant Isopods
6	Ghost

Treasure Within a Sea-Beast

Roll	Result
1-4	Bullion + Jewelry
5-6	Trade-Goods
7	Weapons/Armor
8	Historic Artifacts

Ships: Micro-dungeon filled with 1d2+1 Treasures and are a set of linear rooms equal to the number of treasures+1.

Ruined-Ships: Micro-dungeon filled with 1d4+1 Guarded Treasures and 1 Monster from the Monsters in a Room of a Sea-Beast Table and are a set of linear rooms equal to the number of treasures+1.

Art by Roberto Innocenti

Beastiary

Crazed Sailors/Pirates
HD 1, Def 2, MV 12, Dam 1d6, SV 6, Mo 13

Giant Tapeworms
HD 3, Def 3, MV 6, Dam 1d6+Suction, SV 8, Mo 10

Spider/Crabs/Crustacean
HD 2, Def 5, MV 10, Dam 1d6 x2, SV 6, Mo 8

Giant Isopods
HD 0, Def 1, MV 8, Dam 1d4(as group), SV 5, Mo 12 *when taking damage, roll to see how many die

Half-Dead Berserk Whale
HD 8, Def 4, MV 7, Dam 2d6, SV 10, Mo 12

Crawling Mechanized Shark
HD 3, Def 3, MV 15, Dam 1d10, SV 11, Mo 20

Art by Kainsword

Crazed Gyre Islander
HD 1d4+2, Def 3, MV 12, Dam 1d10, SV 6+HD, Mo 18

Atavistic Merfolk Raiders
HD 2, Def 2, MV 10, Dam 1d6, SV 8, Mo 14

Winged Squids
HD 1, Def 2, MV 16, Dam 1d6, SV 6, Mo 10

Echindaspawn
HD 2, Def 5, MV 5, Dam 1d6, SV 11, Mo 12

Ningen Wanderer
HD 4, Def 1, MV 12, Dam 1d4, SV 10, Mo 6 *pacifist and wants to get out

Art By Sergey Kolesov

Giant Sea Snake/Eel/Lamprey
HD 4, Def 2, MV 12, Dam 1d8+Grapple, SV 6, Mo 12

Undead Sailors
HD 1, Def 2, MV 12, Dam 1d6, SV 6, Mo 20

Treasure Chest Mimic
HD 4, Def 4, MV 12, Dam 1d8, SV 8, Mo 20

Half-Dead Giant Squid
HD 8, Def 2, MV 3, Dam 1d6 x8, SV 7, Mo 6

Ghost
HD 2, Def 0, MV 0, Dam 1d4+100xp drain, SV 9, Mo 20

Fetal Sea-Beast
HD 10, Def 3, MV 9, Dam 1d8, SV 6, Mo 20

Art by Kentaro Miura

Sea-Beast
HP100, Atk 5, Def 2, MV 12, Dam Swallow Whole 1d4 Sailors, SV 13, Mo 20 *regeneration 10/round

Sea-Beast Heart
HD 5, Def 1, MV 0, Dam 0, SV 12, Mo 20 *if a Sea-Beast has no heart it begins to sink to the bottom of the ocean at a rate of 100 ft/minute

Anti-Cartography

I personally hate having to make maps whenever I referee a Tabletop RPG. My players seem to enjoy my maps, when I make them, but I hate having to make them, especially world maps, because I feel it limits my creativity. Now this has to do with how much detail I put into the maps. Ideally, I would just put in very vague locals and simply state what directions they are in. However, players want maps which detail exactly where things are. For this reason, in all of my settings/whenever I Referee. I declare that maps are essentially limited to a 6 mile hex and are essentially treasure maps which show something's locations. Dungeon maps exist but atlases do not. I think I just realized that I'm fine with maps; I just hate Atlases because once made, things have to have a certain spacial alignment.

 I am big fan of non-cardinal directions like upwards, downwards, nearby, faraway, towards the sun, deep, redwards, deathwards, and whimwards. I think that the origins of Tabletop RPG's in war-gaming made an implicit necessity of spacial alignment of locations. Personally, I don't like that. I feel that locations in fantasy don't need to be constrained by only 4 directions. Instead, I prefer to treat my locations as more of a tesseract. If you go north of the tribe of shining men you may find yourself at the mountain of truth, but if you dive deep into the lake in between the two you may find yourself in the cloud castles high above the lands of the shining men. I think that the concept of witch-ways (or at least the thing I imagine witch-ways to be) the ability to travel elsewhere not by distance but by completing an occult algorithm are really cool. Rather than driving two hours to the next city over, you can instead make a specific series paths inside of the local woods, and after entering a storm drain, you end up on top of a skyscraper in the next city over.

One of my favorite things about the OSR style of play is that player knowledge and character knowledge is the same. Players know that dragons have upwards of 10HD and deal their HP when they breath flame. They then implicitly roleplay their character's being scared of dragons because they themselves are. As a Referee one of my greatest joy is the players gaining insight into the world due to character actions such as researching the past, entering dungeons, or interacting with non-human entities. It allows me to "show the setting, rather than telling it", I think this helps player immersion a great deal because as their characters learn something new, they do so as well. For this very reason I tend to have the character's start out as foreigners, and then if they die the players can roll up a native. I feel that this mimics the Player knowledge of the setting and explains how their character now knows so much information that the previous character didn't. I like to do this with maps as well.

Cartography Process

At the beginning of the zeroth session, where the Players and I all agree on certain aspects of the world and make characters. They create the proximal world. I believe this reinforces the notion of the foreign as truly foreign. Players, and in turn their characters, will have an understanding of what is proximal to them because they have been there. However, as the players have their characters travel outwards, they will have no idea what they encounter save for a name.

After everyone rolls up a character, I have the table go around and ask the players questions that describe the town where they are living in. Everything a player says is now a fact. I might disable certain facts or ask to compromise on certain things which I don't feel reflect the tone of the setting to well, but otherwise what they say goes. I feel this also help players by immersing them in the world a bit more and legitimizes their knowledge base. For those familiar with the RPG Beyond The Wall, this is where I got (shamelessly stole) this concept of collaborative world-building.

After their hometown is made I go around the table twice over. Each player will give me a direction and I will have them roll on a table for what type of local they will describe. I will then give them the type of local they rolled and ask them to describe what is there and how they know about it. These aren't facts but instead are inspiration for me to place things in proximity. This populates the region and educates the players in what is nearby.

1d8 Table of what players describe for the referee 

1. Ruins of civilization within historic record
2. Ruins of civilization before historic record
3. Human town
4. Human city
5. Non-human town
6. Mythic monster lair
7. Magical resource
8. Otherworldy entrance

I then make a hex map for myself for purposes of distances, terrain, and geographical encounters. After I have made the mechanical aspects of the hex map I will add thematic elements to match the mechanical such as giving forests, mountains, or oceans names. Then I usually spend an uncomfortable amount of time in front of my computer screen consuming media to steal and tint in order to fill up what the player's described. Then the players decide to visit about only half of the locations on the map and begin writing up my lore/mechanics of each location to put out here so that I haven't wasted all of my time.

Bonus Rant on Creativity

I don't think there is anything wrong with reusing your settings/things you like. In almost all of my settings, I include a sprawling cavern complex filled with fungal spiders and their god. I think it's one of my thematically tightest encounters/dungeons/locals. There is nothing wrong with you doing the same. You can simply take the best encounters/dungeons/npc's/myths/ect and drop them piecemeal into new campaigns. Creativity is a false god. Steal Everything! If you like a character from a piece of fiction, steal him and change his name. If he reacts to the party instead of being just reference, congrats you just made a NPC, you'll enjoy playing. If you like the visuals of a video game/anime/music video/film/comic/tv show/whatever, steal it! Simply put it into your own words effectively and congrats, you have your own aesthetic. I have ran about 3-4 campaigns using the Pokemon Red and Blue setting, all I did was remove 95% of all the Pokemon creatures and used the original Japanese names of things/etymologically similar German/ etymologically similar Norse. No one figured out that they weren't playing a medieval eastern fantasy/medieval western fantasy/viking campaign. Most importantly steal from your own life. If you think your life is boring, then just go out and meet new people/have adventures to fix that. Simply take something that you know well, tint it in some manner, and boom you're a creative genius.