quarry as a dungeon

[muduri]

My TL2½ Fantasy GURPS Hârn campaign now centers on a recently-founded city, for which by the way thanks for many helpful suggestions on a previous thread on its evolution from coastal refugee camp to flourishing center of trade. Related to which, one of the next challenges will be the upgrading key buildings from wood to stone. I'm imagining keep, city walls, and places with prominent fires (smithies, kitchen outbuildings, and even just for the chimney for residences) might lay claim on the first dressed stone.

To adventurize this, I'm thinking the nearby quarry lies idle after an incursion of orcs or monsters. Perhaps the quarriers broke through to the old goblin warrens? And I'd also like to ask, what features / PC challenges / GM challenges would distinguish a quarry from other "dungeons"?

My first thought is that starting at the top with a view down grants an unusual preview of all the creatures within - at least the exposed ones anyway. A GM challenge, I'm imagining, is making sure the PC archers don't just pick off the melee creatures below before the exploration begins - and conversely that it's not stocked with all ranged creatures who TPK the PCs in one enormous volley haha.

Any suggestions, meditations or related observations are, as always, much appreciated from this thoughtful community!

[johndallman]

If the quarry can have been idle for a decade or so, the environment can make life complicated. It's a limestone quarry, and a nearby river has found its way into the pit.

That gives you a nice scenic waterfall, which obscures vision of part of the site, and the water has started to eat away parts of the floor. It's probably flooded a few feet deep, until the river found a way out, likely down the track that was used to take stone away when the quarry was in use.

The first thing to do is clearly to divert the river back into its old bed and let the quarry start to dry out. Then you need to clean out the giant slugs, weird insects, and peculiar cave-dwelling monsters that have moved into the alcoves made by quarrying and the couple of tunnels that the water created in the soluble limestone.

[mlangsdorf]

My suggestion would be to start the PCs at the bottom of the quarry, and have the monsters tunneled into the wall and forted up at the top. Instead of having a scenic view of the camp and letting the ranged attackers go wild, the PCs are at a disadvantage and have to make it up the wall under fire.

I'd put some monsters at the bottom, and some stairs so the PCs don't have to physically climb the wall. The goblins are going to use their heavy melee fighters to block the stairs, while goblin archers are shooting (and dropping things) from above. There are short, disconnected sections of the warren throughout the wall, so when the PCs reach those, they can duck out of the arrow fire - but they risk getting shanked by the goblin ambushers in the warrens.

[muduri]

Very interesting - I’ll use both of those! Sounds like the quarry could be nicely on an escarpment with a goblin fort at the top. Their palisade both affords a clear field of fire that makes entering from the top unappealing, and defends the waterfall that needs to be rediverted to dry out the quarry below. Not that DF needs too much explanation for monsters in a dungeon, but there is a nice ecology set up with skalanx and giant slugs at the bottom up to hobgoblin chieftain in the fort at the top. Many thanks!

[dcarson]

The catacombs under Paris started as quarries and became places to put bodies much later. Quarries don't have to be open.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by muduri

To adventurize this, I'm thinking the nearby quarry lies idle after an incursion of orcs or monsters. Perhaps the quarriers broke through to the old goblin warrens? And I'd also like to ask, what features / PC challenges / GM challenges would distinguish a quarry from other "dungeons"?

Well, mostly the fact that quarries are usually open pit mines, which makes them not a dungeon at all.

The key question for any monster problem is... why are the monsters there? The simplest answer is "because they were using it as a quarry and take exception towards claimjumpers", but that might be overly realistic.

[johndallman]

Be careful of making it obviously tough at the start. There is always the alternative of starting a new quarry somewhere else.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by dcarson

The catacombs under Paris started as quarries and became places to put bodies much later. Quarries don't have to be open.

FWIW, my college was built around an abandoned open pit quarry, with most of the dorms at the bottom level and the scholastic buildings above. I was very much thinking of the 6 floor walk-up I had during freshman year when I suggested putting a fort at the top and starting the PCs at the bottom.

A closed pit quarry that turns into a goblin warren is a pretty conventional dungeon. I think the open pit is a lot more tactically interesting.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

My suggestion would be to start the PCs at the bottom of the quarry, and have the monsters tunneled into the wall and forted up at the top. Instead of having a scenic view of the camp and letting the ranged attackers go wild, the PCs are at a disadvantage and have to make it up the wall under fire.

If they start out at the bottom of the quarry, I find myself wondering how the PCs got there, since the outsides of quarries are usually higher up. Did they step out of a traveling police box, or did the river that broke into the quarry go out a tunnel or large fissure, and they followed it upstream?

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

If they start out at the bottom of the quarry, I find myself wondering how the PCs got there, since the outsides of quarries are usually higher up. Did they step out of a traveling police box, or did the river that broke into the quarry go out a tunnel or large fissure, and they followed it upstream?

One of the major hassles with a quarry is keeping it drained, so that you continue to have a quarry rather than a lake.

That means that drainage tunnels might be built into the bottom of the quarry, directed towards a local river at a lower elevation than the quarry.

The dungeon crawl starts by the river, with the adventurers working their way slowly uphill along the drainage tunnel, hoping to get the element of surprise by appearing inside the quarry at the bottom. Otherwise, they'd have to punch their way through multiple prepared lines of defenses surrounding the quarry.

For extra dramatic tension, let the party be "commandos" whose mission is to open gates or otherwise weaken formidable defenses from the inside so that a force of regular troops can successfully drive off the Orcish/Goblin army. That puts time pressure on the PCs, gives them a reason to visit certain areas of the dungeon beyond "kill things and take their stuff", and also ties the adventure into a broader, more meaningful campaign narrative.