Light the Way! An Alternative to Tracking Torches

Image sourced from Ave Nox

Pick a book off your shelf of P/OSR games, slam it on your desk and flip through the first few pages. Chances are within those first 5-10 pages you’ll find some reference to tracking torch duration, wether it’s one extinguished every 6 turns, a random roll on a six-sided die every turn, or every 60 real life minutes. 

Since the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons managing light in the form of torches has been the centre of a resource management cycle in certain play-cultures of fantasy adventure gaming. In particular the OSR has become synonymous with tracking torches. Games like Draw Steel even define themselves by contrast as “not a game where you track torches”.

And somewhat surprisingly, neither is any version of Dungeons and Dragons. While torches appear on equipment lists it’s as a part of standard packages of equipment. DnD, if it cares about encumbrance, only cares about weapons, armour and treasure, it does not expect you to account for carrying enough torches rules-as-written. 

I’m no DnD historian so I can’t speak to when and how it all started, but within the framework of the received wisdom of the OSR play culture the logic seems to go as follows:

The maxim goes that STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT and it is oft repeated (if at least somewhat misleading). From this follows the idea that the accounting of the half-life of supplies as an adjacent concern of proper time keeping is also of utmost importance. Combine these two notions and you have the justification for a resource management cycle that determines the pace of exploration.

As ubiquitous as this resource management game has become however, for some the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze . These brave iconoclasts dare to imagine a world that isn’t measured in torch timers. 

The Illusory Sensorium blog points out in There is No Light, that the “triangularity” of risk and reward purportedly presented by tracking torches is somewhat moot since the consequence of the “risk” offered presented is, it gets dark I guess? Most games provide little to no guidance on how to play out this “fail state”. As Illusory Sensorium sagely illuminates: “scrobbling about in pitch black is not very toyetic”. Additionally the post points out that there are already far more effective, non-arbitrary forms of attrition baked into the dungeon crawl, encumbrance and random encounters! 

The more treasure, weapons and armour you carry, the more you stand to lose. As for random encounters they embody the ur-spice of the dungeon crawl: the tension between do you cut your losses and head back to the safety of the town, or do you press on risking life and limb for a chance at even greater reward?

Marcia of Traverse Fantasy has written a few times about the topic as well, most importantly for our purposes her own proposed fix for the resource management game of dungeon crawling: Stationery & Maps. She divorces the resource management game from torch tracking and instead applies it to the process of player mapping. Basically, players carry units of stationery that they expend as they map the dungeon rooms, players can “fast travel” between mapped rooms and running out of stationery means losing the ability to map out new rooms. 

This makes for a very neat system with a few distinct advantages: unlike torches which can feel somewhat arbitrary maps and stationery have a direct effect on how players interact with the world. Unlike the ambiguous fail state of running out of torches, when you run out of mapping supplies in Marcia’s model it means you can no longer map nor travel as fast, which has direct consequences for both the navigation challenge of old school style dungeon crawls and the push-your-luck decision making that random encounters naturally drive. Moving slower means more random encounters and consequently more chance for attrition of hp, prepared spells, hireling morale etc.

Now, while tracking torches may not spark joy, the stygian depths of darkness make for a rich soil for the stuff of dungeon crawling: danger, mystery and risk. The Illusory Sensorium blog makes a compelling case for this in There is No Light , drawing on advice from the excellent Veins of the Earth, arguing that the default description of the dungeon should consist of the negative space left in the sea of pitch-black. 

“When someone enters a new underground space, never say ‘you enter a cave’. Because they don’t know that. ONLY EVER SAY ‘YOU SEE...’ And they can only see so far.” 

• Patrick Stuart, Veins of the Earth

So that begs the question, is there a way to reap the benefits of an attritional resource management cycle that presents more interesting, non-arbitrary consequences while still retaining the intriguing mystery that abounds when There is No Light? Well you read the title, of course there is! 

Firstly you assume There is No Light and therefore players must carry their own into the dungeon. This light takes the form of a lantern with an indefinite duration (it’s more historically accurate , really). Narrate the environment only as far as the lantern-light falls, with only shapeless forms and glinting steel beyond it. 

This already presents an evocative procedure, but the twist is this: while the lantern doesn’t deplete over time, it can be snuffed out either deliberately by dungeon denizens or as the result of a failed save. 

This has the immediate consequence of plunging the party into darkness, but it has the additional effect of the pitch darkness making it so it’s impossible to use mapping stationery to map or fast travel. 

The darkness and slower movement mean that enemy encounters are more likely and likely to catch them by surprise, leaning into the natural escalation of dangers inherent in the random encounter roll. 

It also presents a fail state with a modicum of choice: either press on and hope you can find a light source or some other way to navigate, or try and make it out of the dungeon in one piece to restock and regroup, perhaps making use of one of those escape-the-dungeon tables if you’re in a hurry.

You can also guard against this fail safe by bringing backup lanterns at the cost of some inventory space, or even getting a dedicated lantern-bearer hireling (though that might backfire slightly if they get spooked and abandon you in the dark or fall down a pit trap).

And that’s the idea! I’m rather pleased with it, though it hasn’t been tested at the table I’m keen to change that. This blogpost is my first, hopefully of many, so if you have any thoughts or critiques be sure to let me know, maybe I’ll address them in a future post. What do you think about tracking torches? Or about tying player mapping to resource management? Until next time, happy dungeon delving! Make sure you’ve got enough light to go around.

P.S. Special thanks to Marcia for encouraging me to post this idea after sharing it in her comments. I’m a big admirer of her work so her thinking my idea was good enough to share on a more visible platform was just the push I needed. Thanks Marcia!