Using Old School Resources For Designing Martian Adventures In The Warriors of the Red Planet Rpg & Beyond

  Tonight has seen me working on a Warriors of the Red Planet Rpg Martian urban campaign leg. This has led me down some twisted old school paths. This includes Edgar Rice Burroughs literature. 

One of the first books that I busted out was my 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. This includes some additional urban encounter tables & a city generator. Also the random dungeon generator helps a ton for sketching out the underworld especially if your players are familar with the Warriors of the Red Planet rpg rule book.
Again totally stealing this photo from Wayne's Books. 

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 There's something very primal about designing your own urban encounters imagining in your mind's eye strolling down city streets while against the radium glow of a street light bandits await in a nearby alleyway. The thing about Martian cities is the fact that these are melting pots for many different tribes of Red Men ala Lee Brackett's Martian literature. 

This brings up the treasure which is going to be a 'special hoard' this is going to be designed using James Ward's article in Dragon magazine issue #9 'Tombs & Crypts'. Because Martian cities are built one on top of another as the centuries roll on. 

This aspect of Martian cities can be seen in Burroughs 'A Fighting Man of Mars' in which we get our only example of Martian dungeon crawling. Speaking of 'The Dragon' magazine there's also Dragon Magazine issue #31 which has two articles on jungles. Mars has extensive jungle environments that everyone seems to forget about. These are essential to the design of old school Martian adventures. There's also 'the Anatomy of The Lich' By Len Lakofka from The Dragon issue #26 because we can see an ancient Martian wishing to preserve themselves as an immortal one way or another. 
The idea of an urban lich operating behind the shadows of some Martian city has lots of appeal too me as a dungeon master. I've been reaching deeply into my bag of old school tricks on this one. 

Michael Whelan artwork used without permission.