Mudcore is rad

I have titled my newest campaign "Mudcore" as a tongue in cheek call back to an often disparaged style of game. In brief, Mudcore refers to a game where the player characters are frequently far from heroic and typically spend their short miserable lives wallowing in the filth of some dungeon that WILL kill you; its only a matter of how long until it does. I've seen the term used in conversations typically bashing the mythological "Old School" style of play as if most gaming tables in the halcyon days measured the life of their characters in hours and never saw level 3. The best they might do was scrounge some loose change on the floor before slinking away to the nearest bar sniveling and snorting. From my understanding this certainly was NOT the case but getting to the truth of the common original dungeons and dragons experience is of little use or interest to me. 

I am primarily interested in the mythology and, in this case, was curious what a game that took some of those premises and went with them would look like. 

Enter Mudcore. The year is 1865 and the president is dead. You are returning home to your small Pennsylvanian mining town like so many others at the conclusion of the Civil War. There, you find the dungeon. With nought but ingenuity and the resources you can find among the depths you'll seek to travel ever deeper in to the earth to solve the great mysteries of your hometown, possibly recover lost treasures, and confirm the veracity of the rumored Ring Of Wishes in the mine's depths. 

Death at 0 HP. ODND (Or well Swords and Wizardry), and starting at level 0. One to one time. The denizens of the dungeon are horrific, the traps are devious, and above all the dungeon is motivated to lure you in to your doom. 

 

Does that sound like fun at all?

 

My players certainly think so and most of them cut their teeth on DnD 5e, Pathfinder, and modern fantasy. We've been having a ton of fun as a departure from the more standard epic tales we've told as a group. This is about a small town, not saving the world. Its about the megadungeon, there is not much else to do but explore it. And its about the characters, will they make it out of this one alive? I think pitching the expectations of this game - its relatively high lethality and clear focus on dungeon exploration - was an essential element of getting this to work. I think the mythology of Mudcore games and the hated response/reputation arises not really from the conditions of the game, but rather an adversarial relationship between the DM and the players. I can easily imagine this being a terrible experience if sprung on unsuspecting players or if the DM goes on a power trip. I've learned from this in the dozen or so session so far that even in this very "limiting" experience, many players will thrive. I feel it analogous to improv: a completely blank page with no guidance is very hard to get into, but if you have an initial set of conditions that limit your options, it can be counterintuitively easier to be creative and have fun. 

Now for the negatives. Not all my players have enjoyed the transition. There is a subset that bounced off of the idea and only occasionally show up. And that is totally fine by me. I'd much rather run a focused game for a group of people that are really enjoying it, than a generalist style game that only kinda appeals to folks who spend half the time on their phones. Its been refreshing, I may template my games in the future on this idea (although I am blessed with a particularly large group of TTRPG enthusiast friends). 

In our games, characters die. They struggle with challenges trivial in other high fantasy role playing games (How do we even get down this 20 ft drop? Or did we come in from the right or left passage, are we lost?). And honestly progression (We use GP for XP) is comparatively slow. But my players (and I!) have really been enjoying the clear focus and a chance to slowly unwind the mysteries of a small region, get to know the local characters and environment, and take part in the small problems of the town. I've built in a few things to appeal to different types of players; an overarching mystery for the players invested in lore/world building, a megadungeon with lots of factions and history to explore for players who like exploration, and challenging encounters with bizarre/unusual monsters for players who like puzzles and violence. Does that make this no longer a Mudcore game? At least according to my definition it still is but argue however you want. In conclusion, I don't think running a game with high lethality with characters who are not epic heroes or even characters who are ratcatchers by day is somehow a negative. As long as you have buy in from your players and are clear about expectations, it can be a fun and rewarding experience (or even a palate cleanser between other types of games). 

I've also got great players so my experiment here should be taken with a grain of salt.  

Oh and I produced a trailer to get my players in the mood for the game as well as tease a few of the mysteries. If you are curious, here it is below: 

 

So I failed my hexploration challenge

 

Why? Life. Its always life. Just like what keeps you from being able to run those games you want to run or the root of scheduling issues, the final boss of the TTRPG hobby. Actually, it is more accurate to say my priorities shifted. I stopped blogging about it regularly sometime in Feb 2024 but kept playing through April. I think my project ended up being more ambitious than I expected (a running theme with my experience in this hobby).  

So why I am talking about it now? Because I still think about it. I see the notebook on my shelf right above my computer and open it every once in a while just to read a bit. I would like to return to it one day but I think its important to have a retrospective on why I stopped and what I can do to bring the project back to life in a more manageable way. More specifically, I'd like to return to it in a substantive way and continue to explore that world. By looking a bit closer at what my goals were, the processes I was using, and thinking a bit about why my priorities shifted I hope I can figure out what new form that exploration should take. There are probably some general lessons in here that may be useful to some folks or in the very least an interesting story.  

Solo gaming can be a very powerful creative tool that is both enriching to the general hobby experience and also a useful exercise in developing the creative muscles we use in the TTRPG hobby. So its both fun and also helpful for improving as a DM. If you are curious on the general details of solo gaming, here are a few resources I think that nicely describe the general idea and how you might get started: 

Bandit's Keep: A video on some of the reasons why you might want to do solo DND.

Tales of the Manticore: A great Solo DND podcast, see how it is done!

Just playing Solo: A relatively short video that covers some reasons why and just jumps right into the process of using some tools

So why was I doing this? My original goal was to take part in the Hexplore24 challenge  but also I had been inspired by watching Bandit's Keep's solo game using ODND (as an aside, highly recommend its good listening and very helpful for putting you to sleep). Lastly I had been thinking a lot about an old campaign I ran in college 100 years ago (or like 2017, which might as well have been 100 years ago). This game featured a large hexmap where the players were searching for a long lost city supposedly full of treasure and wonders. It was an amazing campaign I'll talk about one day but that is too long for here (It ended with the party on a bullet train after failing to stop the launch of nuclear missiles threatening to rain down on the major cities of the world and them realizing the only way to stop it was to use their one Wish spell to prevent their characters from ever meeting each other...Good shit). I had really enjoyed the campaign structure of hex crawling, delving into the ruins and meeting with the locals as they slowly made their way to the city. So I had a premise for the game and some random tables (this is a great resource for wilderness exploration, HIGHLY recommend you save a copy of it) and tools at my disposal to draft up pretty much anything I might have needed. 

The idea was to spend just a few minutes a day or maybe like an hour or so a week rolling up a hexmap, and then in my case moving around a small party of heroes as they explored the space. I would roll randomly for what they encountered (once two different green dragons in as many days!) and used some basic oracles to figure out what they characters might do. This worked really well actually and before long I was off on a grand adventure. There were some really amazing experiences, from the previously mentioned dragons, to discovering a temple under attack from feline demons, to banding together with some goblins to take on a large camp of hobgoblins besieging a castle. It is amazing what you can come up with with just a few random tables and saying yes and to the random encounters you roll. I started to notice a problem though. Even though I'd only explored a relatively small area in the grand scheme of things (I put the chance of finding the city in a given hex at 1/1000 or so to start), I quickly became enamored with this little corner of the world and the role my characters were starting to play in it. And "sessions" started taking longer and longer. I couldn't keep up posting about it so that fell to the way side and then eventually we started up a new home game, grad school got hectic, and I just put the notebook down. It became too much of a chore in a way; not that I didn't enjoy it but it just took up too much time in an already overloaded schedule. 

That is probably the thesis of this: scope creep in our hobbies (whether its solo DND or painting Warhammer figures) can quickly stop you from even taking part in the process. Being realistic with your time commitments and identifying when this scope creep happens is good practice for any project, hobby or otherwise. While its great to be excited about your new latest project or hobby you will almost certainly burn out if its not balanced and you might put it down never to pick it up again. It is also worth saying of course there is nothing wrong with not continuing a hobby, but sometimes we give up on hobbies and don't recognize its not because we don't enjoy it anymore, but rather we build up a mental block from over-eagerness. Recognizing when this might be happening and taking preemptive steps such as pumping the breaks, scheduling time for your hobby, and just being cognizant of burnout as it happens. It just might save your hobby time. 

But what if you just don't have the time? Like everything else in life, its not that you don't have time its just that it isn't a priority. If you'd really like to make it work even on a busy schedule, I'd recommend setting aside a single weeknight evening (weeknight because in my experience its more likely you won't have spontaneous plans come up) and just mark off an hour. 8 PM on Wednesday is Solo DnD night. Make yourself some tea, get a crumpet, whatever your local ritual is and just play/engage for an hour. And keep to it! Do that for a few months and quickly it will become a habit. Its a fairly low barrier to entry and for something fun it shouldn't be too onerous. 

I failed the challenge in the sense I didn't complete a full year of the game. But honestly, it was wildly successful by any other meaningful metric. Enough so I still want to return to it despite having other healthy games going and it having been more than a year since I last played. This time I wont have the pressure of the Hexplore24 challenge (it is certainly not going to happen every night) but instead schedule some time one weeknight, just for an hour, to open back up that small notebook and catch up with some old friends. Maybe they will reach the Golden City one day or maybe not. What is certain is that the next hex over the hill won't explore itself.