Babies in Dungeons
This post was written in the throes of sleep-deprived early parenthood, and I’m not sure which parts, if any, I stand behind. But just like not all player characters need to be orphans, they don’t all have to be childless either.
If you’re hardscrabble enough that you need to delve caverns full of monsters that want to kill you just for the chance to bring back a rotted chest of coins or magical but slightly cursed sword, you probably don’t have the scratch for a babysitter. By the way, if you’re one of those who balks at the “combat wheelchair” or is fine with elves and dwarves but having adventurers who aren’t all able-bodied men in the prime of youth is just too fantastical for you, you might as well tune out now. In my view, beyond even representational concerns, I like my adventuring to be risky and dramatic and having adventurers who are disabled, who are elderly, who are caring for a child all ramps up the stakes of a dungeon crawl. Welcome the challenge and play a parent character in your next campaign.
When you bring a baby into a dungeon, they are a ticking clock. Give them a Cry Die, which is rolled each dungeon exploration turn to determine whether they begin to get loudly fussy. If they do get fussy, the referee rolls a random encounter, which is alerted by the sound of the baby.
The Cry Die starts at a d20 and, every time it is rolled, it goes down a size (from d20 to d12, d12 to d10, etc). The Cry Die never goes below a d4, so just keep rolling a d4 when it gets to that point. When the Cry Die rolls a 1, the baby gets upset and loudly expresses their displeasure for all to hear. This provokes a random encounter. To some monsters in the dungeon, a baby is a tasty treat. Whenever the baby is fed or changed, reset the Cry Die to d20. Feeding the baby and changing its diaper takes one dungeon exploration turn spent in a room with no immediate or obvious dangers (if you want to change a diaper while fleeing from orcs, you’re going to need to roll for it, not just spend the requisite time).
At first, I thought: why not just map this onto the famous Hazard Die? It’s another resource to track, like torches, after all. The reason is that the consequence of the baby throwing a fit in the dungeon should be independent of (and in addition to) any random encounters that are produced the ordinary way by non-baby-toting adventurers. The goal is to incorporate another push-your-luck element into the dungeon crawl—do we find a safe place and stop to attend to the child now (where there are still risks of random encounters thanks to the ordinary random encounter check), or do we press forward but with the risk of a random encounter drawn by the fussing baby?
As an addendum to this note on random encounters, noted dungeon-lover and my college Gus L of the All Dead Generations blog, shared some wisdom on the Prismatic Wasteland discord server regarding their essential nature of random encounters that gives a dungeon crawl its tension:
“[R]andom encounters function as the major check on player caution and delay in the dungeon crawl context ... Without them you end up with a dungeon that goes stale very fast. [If you remove random encounters from a dungeon crawl,] you risk having nothing to make exploration tense in a mega-dungeon which is fundamentally about exploration.”
Why bring a baby into a dungeon though? It’s a good question. Dr. Spock and other authorities in the field of early childhood, I’m sure, advise against it. But maybe your character simply can’t find suitable care (most the hirelings in the town outside the dungeon are looking for work as mercenaries and torchbearers, and aren’t perfectly suited for care work of any kind, much less babysitting), or maybe your character just feels more at ease with their baby by their side, or maybe it’s simply “bring your kid to work” day. However, the most compelling reason might be something akin to the Lone Wolf and Cub trope that is so popular these days, from Last of Us (but not a baby) to The Mandalorian (a baby but also a yoda). My favorite implementation of this in TTRPGs so far is in Nate Treme’s What Child Is This?, wherein the baby is a MacGuffin who must be delivered to a temple. Who better to trust with such a quest than murderhobos?
You should want your dungeons to be tense and dangerous. Adding monsters to a dungeon is a no-brainer. But adding monsters AND a fussy baby? The tense adventure (or screwball comedy of errors coming soon to VHS) writes itself.
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