Player-Facing Tunnelers Resources

To begin the Tunnelers campaign, present the following to your players:

For as long as you can remember you have been convinced there is something for you to be found underground. This fixation has shaped your life in ways great and subtle. Such an eccentricity eventually attracts attention; childhood fixations on paleontology, keeping burrowing animals, and building of mud castles are tolerated, even charming, but such eccentricities lead to scrutiny, sometimes even turmoil, as an adult: pits dug in lawns, fascinations with abandoned basements that really aren’t safe, too much spent on caving gear you really don’t have the extra money for.

Luckily there are those who understand. You found the blogs of others with the same interests, and eventually the chatrooms. You got brave enough to meet a few in person, awkward conversations with people who might share no commonalities with you, except that you all feel the same call to find deep places and dig them deeper. There is a camaraderie in this that transcends your differences. Together you plan, and share, and dig, and you learn that the deep places care for you too: you and a select other few are let in on the really interesting discoveries, the secret videos, the password protected incognito chatrooms where others explain the secret rites that change the world.

This is how you have ended up here, in a small town of Dundarave in the north of Washington State. The name has come up in the chat a few times, and it has an electrifying effect on some, who immediately become obsessed with artifacts of the place, posted anonymously: photographs of the construction of a scottish-style castle, river banks with deer bones embedded in them, old factory buildings in the hills, tree stumps the size of cars sitting in the mud. For others it took longer, but the pictures lingered in everyones minds. Then a video: 10 seconds of darkness with the sound of fumbling and frogs, then a light revealing a stone corridor, piles of rope, shovels, a box with a takeout container sitting atop it. The camera moves down the tunnel, lingering on windows (nothing visible through them), then a pried up floor stone. A hole under it, a ladder, a woman (unidentified) on the ladder. The camera looks back up in the corridor, which disappears into darkness, then the film ends.

There was nothing in the video that marked this as happening in Dundarave, but the consensus was immediate. That dirt just looked right for it. Within a few weeks, plans were made.

There’s something under this town, and you are going to find out what.

If you enjoy sharing mood-setting music, I recommend The Penrose Stairs, by Supplicate

The mechanical trappings of this game use Sam Sorenson’s Lowlife and R Rook Studios’s Barrow Keep: Den of Spies layered atop some house modifications to Old School Essentials (the basic version should be perfectly sufficient, as basic resolution and the Thief class saves+advancement are the primary needs — if you have the slim reference booklet on hand for ease of perusal, even better). You will need these texts.

GMs, provide the following character creation procedure with your players, sharing appropriate tables and excerpts from the aforementioned rules texts when needed.

“to make a Tunneler:
1. roll 3d6 for your 3 ability scores, Strength, Agility, Constitution. Note these on your character sheet.
2. note your starting save values, which you must roll over to avoid certain negative effects. These begin as: 13 vs Sickness, 16 vs Explosions, and 15 vs Curses.
3. Note your starting attack values and AC: 0 by default for both Melee and Ranged attacks, and an AC of 9.
4. Roll 1d4 for your starting hp.
5. Apply some ability score modifiers:
Str adjusts melee attack value
Agi adjusts ranged attack value, save vs explosion, and AC (a bonus lowers ac and saves, a penalty raises it)
Con adjusts hp and save vs sickness (a bonus lowers saves, a penalty raises it. starting hp will never go below 1.)
3 = -3
4-5 = -2
6-8 = -1
9-12 = none
13-15 = +1
16-17 = +2
18 = +3

Pick a name, pronouns, the screen name you use on the Tunneling chatrooms, your career outside of the lifestyle, and any other identity details you wish to fill out.

You start the game with the following items: a pickaxe, a shovel, a hammer and chisel, several changes of clothes, and a camping knife.
Additionally, roll on the Tunnel Rat gear table in Lowlife (Lowlife page 33) 3 times, and on the d100 trinket table (Lowlife back cover) 3 times.
Roll or choose one talent from the Deep Dwellers list (Lowlife page 32).
Your character advances in level as an OSE Thief. XP is measured in dollars rather than coins. Upon gaining a level, roll one new Deep Dwellers talent, and reference the OSE Thief hit die, attack value, and save values, noting that Sickness is analogous to Death or Poison, Explosions is analogous to Breath Attacks, and Curses is analogous to Spells Rods or Staves.”

GMs, finally, make sure that the Lowlife rules for Caving (Lowlife pages 4-7 Climbing (Lowlife pages 8-11), Tunneling (Lowlife pages 12-14), and the Barrow Keep: Den of Spies rules (though no specific rituals yet) for Ritual Magic (Barrow keep pages 30-31) are all available for reference – for my online game I pasted relevant text and images of the relevant charts to a discord channel, and a physical binder seperate from any dedicated DM binders could serve much the same purpose.

Add to this reference material as necessary: any game mechanisms introduced or adjusted, rituals learned, or notable pieces of player discovery they wish to record should be appended for reference and posterity.