Going To Move Some Secret Doors and Stairs

In the Moathouse, specifically.

When I was fooling around with the ambush stuff recently, I observed that the secret stairs in the Moathouse are in no way related to the layout of the actual maps.

On the upper floor of the Moathouse, the secret stairs are situated in the far north corner of the building, where the bandits are. Yet, by compositing the upper floor and Moathouse dungeon maps and using the main stairway as a fixed alignment orientation point (see 'Moathoue Composite 1'), we see that the jump point for the stairs in the dungeon (where you arrive if you take the stairs) is far to the southeast on the map. So either those are some very long and crooked stairs or they just weren't positioned intelligently to begin with.

So, I'm going to move the secret stairs on the upper floor map to the far southeast corner near the giant snake, where they will be in direct relation to the jump point in the dungeon. (See 'Moathouse Secret Stairs.') I don't believe this will have any practical effect on gameplay.

The Moathouse secret door in the rear is another matter. It's relationship to the point of ingress on the inside map is generally correct; however, I'd like to move that slightly as well to correspond to the pile of what looks like wreckage and debris (where an actual door might concievably have once been and now be camouflaged) in the spot slightly south around the corner in the main room of the upper floor where the rats walk around (see 'Moathouse Composite 2'). The only practical effect on gameplay this should have is that you won't get the bandits battle immediately upon entering. You'll have to go open the door for that to happen, like if you enter by the front door. I don't believe this is a big deal.

The idea here is to add to the continuity of the experience by having a literal spatial relationship between these aspects of the maps and cut down on the 'you magically arrive someplace you shouldn't' mumbo-jumbo. And to make the secret door a bit more believeable by not having it hidden in a featureless wall. :thumbsup:

 

[Total rewrite of post]. I like the thinking here Gaear but the problem is one of perspective. In both cases the secret stairs are '8 across and one up' from the main stairs so they match up, but the perspective of the lower dungeon has changed: the upper moathouse is viewed isometrically with NE at the top (as it were) while the dungeon below is viewed with NW to the top. Unfortunately the programmers had to do that to allow as much detail as possible to face the players - it happens in the perspectives of a few of the Hommletian houses (you go in facing one direction and arrive facing another) and of course it was an issue that came up when we were doing the Outer Bailey map of the Keep and had to move a few doors around. Anyway, its certainly faithful to the original module: from the perspective of your pix, you simply can't put the top one directly over the bottom one, they are facing two different directions (to labour the point: I've had to rewrite this post because its hard enough just explaining this).

As for the back door - I sorta think the point there is its the back way out for the bandits. In the original module, if a party looked overwhelming, they would take their treasure and sneak out that way while the players came in the front. So having it open in the bat room doesn't work either: it means the bandits have placed themselves inside a dead end, which would be tactically silly, while there is a secret door with a little bridge outside there for no reason established by, well, not the bandits which was the point.

Sorry - I know a lot of thought went into what you were proposing :blush:

 

Maybe make the secret door one way. I like to jump in and surprise the bandits sometimes so I wouldn't want it removed entirely: and that it way it won't break the ambush. And who uses it to go out anyway?

EDIT: Damn, just realised I screwed up royally in my earlier post. Sorry Gaear, I thought you were suggesting moving the secret door to the room where the bats are. I now realise you are suggesting the wreckage outside that room. if you look carefully, you will see some stairs at that point: thats where the collapsed upper floor has blocked the stairs going up. Not really somewhere there could be a door to the outside.

2nd EDIT: Arioch - if you go through the secret door, then you can hit the bandits in the courtyard from inside the Moathouse: its an entirely different experience since you start the fight right in their faces.

 

[edit - reply to earlier posts]

Hmmm ... I guess I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure we should look at it that way. I think it would be wise for us to always assume that north is up, like with any normal map, and just accept any disagreements between that and the module's layout and Troika's depiction of the maps as incidental. Which, in this case, would still mean moving the secret stairs.

Look at it this way: unless a player has intimate knowledge of the module, he won't know that his perspective has changed from one floor to another. He will assume that north is always up, and in the case of our secret stairs, that they lie in the northeasterly region of the upper floor of the Moathouse. When he then goes down them, he will suddenly find himself in the southeasterly region of the dungeon (that level of it anyway). This causes discontinuity, regardless of whether or not the module said the secret stairs were in x and y coordinates or whether or not Troika decided to depict different angles of perspective for different maps. Such a thing can only be further exascerbated by the (mis)alignment of the main staircase, in this case, which appears identical on both floors.

So I believe what appears on the maps, based upon some basic fundamental assumptions about direction, should trump the pnp module grid in these cases.

I understand that many people may not care about this at all, but it just bothers me personally to have glaring inconsistencies like that, and I think we should avoid them whenever possible.

North should always be up for our purposes, and a straight staircase that runs down in a southwesterly direction should be assumed to still be running southwest when you get downstairs. We can't look at the Troika maps with anything but a literal interpretation and still have that be true.

 

Re: the secret door, I really don't want to remove it. While it may or may not have been in the PnP module, it definitely was in Troika's game, and we have to remember (myself included) that we're not rewriting the game, we're just tweaking it.

I guess I'm okay with leaving it where it is too, based on the testimony here. It's a shame - I think it would have been kind of cool to be able to sneak nearly all the way to Lareth, as Sitra pointed out.

@threatrock - thanks for the input, but I don't think the ambush will be leaving the cave exit map. Also, the ambushers can't be ambushed within the limitations of the existing dialogue.

I don't really want to do anything else with that mod, frankly, besides tie up the loose ends and put it to bed!

 

EDIT: Hang on Jesse, my copy of T1 (stand alone) clearly says 'south' for the bugbears, and no directions for the gold trail. Cf the gnoll encounter: "(if the party bribe them), they will lead the party to the north passage going to where 'Master' is... then proceeed east to the exit". Thats a completely accurate description of the back exit out.

Still, the maps are the maps. I have to say, I for one really dislike the idea of changing something from the module, as the secret stairs location is, for reasons like this. Thats just me: I think we should adhere to modular consistency where reasonable.

 

If you mean like in the image below (which puts Lareth north of the bugbears), that wouldn't work because the perspective of the walls becomes incorrect.

I'm all for modular consistency where reasonable too, but having a confusing and itself inherently inconsistent map is not reasonable imo.

We're stuck with Troika's depiction of the maps, like it or not. Unless somebody wants to go nuts and 'correct' the maps and everything that goes along with them - which I don't think is merited. Whereas module loyalty is vital in some areas, the layout of the maps may not be as vital, which we can see even from the fact that Troika took liberties with them. What's more important is that they make sense. The secret stairs as currently layed out do not.

I suppose ultimately this boils down to a matter of significance really, for which I freely admit the secret stairs don't exactly qualify. No one has apparently cared until now, or hasn't noticed (or at least never complained).

More important though is our agreement about something so fundamental as the orientation of a map. If we can't all agree that north is up on a map, then there's not much point in trying to agree on anything else.