Adding vampires to Caverns

Changes to tiles too?

If you want your cavern tiles to have precisely the same number of red spots as there are Caverns cards to discover, you’ll need to add exactly 5 new red spots to your tiles. (You don’t have to: Caverns doesn’t need to guarantee that every monster and item is discoverable in any given play-through.) If so, this may mean you don’t just add spots, but also some new tiles bearing the caverns in which these spots are located. If you do that, then perhaps you could add a few more passage tiles to service them too. And once you’ve done that, maybe you could add a new Passage Encounter card too (another clove of garlic, perhaps? Some people think you can never have too much garlic).

Vampire marker cards

You need a way to keep track of which players or monsters are vampires, since in effect this is a state that isn’t indicated on the card that bears the killed-but-not-dead individual’s statistics or attributes. You could do this with any kind of token, but making cards seems in keeping with the existing game, provided you make the cards clearly different (for example, printed on red stock, or with different backs) from all others. You don’t want these tokens to get mixed in with any of the other cards before the game has begun. I used black-and-white backs with horrific splotches of red blood splashed onto them (unlike cards that are keeping their identity secret, these don’t need to be uniform on the back).

In any game, you might need lots of these, or you might need none: I made around eight.

Other things

Maybe vampires should not be able to use the All-seeing Mirror (it’s one of the Passage Encounter cards). Or maybe vampires can use magic mirrors, it’s just they don’t have reflections in them. It depends how you think magic mirrors work, I suppose.

The illustration of the vampire itself was included in the scrapbook a good seven years before I got around to adding this page that includes the card it was from. I coloured that illustration for the scrapbook, and foolishly decided to show the vampire casting a shadow. It’s been wrong so long, I’ve decided not to fix it.

An unrelated Cloak of Invisibility

For reasons lost in time — but almost certainly because one of the original young players had simply asked for it — there’s one more extra card in the “vampire expansion” that has nothing to do with vampires. But here it is anyway: an invisibility cloak. The game already has a mechanism for invisibility (see the Invisibility magic spell — one reason why the tiles are numbered is to record the position of invisible players or monsters in the absence of their figure, to prevent disputes and/or allegations of cheating). So the absence of any magic items that enable it is perhaps surprising. Clearly someone thought so, and this presumably is the result.

Note that, unexpectedly (but maybe for reasons of game balance; I don’t remember), the card doesn’t simply bestow invisibility. Instead it lets its wearer cast the Invisibility spell, which isn’t quite the same thing. Casting the spell implies rolling a die to determine success and, according to the spell-book, becoming invisible usually only works about 50% of the time.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license (zip files containing all the card illustrations and tiles (uh... except the ones on this “& vampires” page, they’re not in the zips, sorry) are available for download as a jumping-off point for you to create your own version). It was inspired over twenty-five years ago by two original games — The Sorcerer’s Cave and The Mystic Wood. Please read about the game’s origins to understand how it came about.