I am currnetly running the Sinister Stone of Sakkara for my group and I have a question about light sources. My players have found the temple and are about to enter. Reading throught the first level to refresh my memory about the various locations, something jumped out at me.
In the descriptions of the rooms being occuiped and used by the various factions some rooms have light sources described, torches, burning braziers, etc, while others are not.,
Some examples
Room 3, Kobold Guard Room, Room 4. Kobold Quarters and Room 9. The King's Chambers have no mention of any kind of light source.
Room 6. King's Guards specifies that there are two burning braziers.
What should a DM assume? The beastmen all have infravision, but does this mean they just sit around in the dark? Do they not cook their food, eating it raw instead?
In the areas where there is should be a lot of traffic, like the Great Hall and the Courtyard are they unlit?
[I am not an autarch] For cooking their food, the Kobold random encounter mentions a soup pot in Area 1, Room 4, apparently used for cooking the rats they hunt. Similarly, the hobgoblins have a makeshift oven in room 59. I would imagine the orcs could have some crude cooking appliance in their dining-room (room 28).
Beyond any incidental light such as the fire involved in cooking however, the beastmen do not require light at all. They are adapted to life underground. It seems to me like having torches would be a lot of hassle from the monsters' perspective. Keeping even one brazier lit with torches is 1 silver per six hours (translating to 4 silver a day, or 146 gold a year), so I'd think they would only keep light in rooms where light is essential, or perhaps as a luxury of sorts, or as a defense measure like in room 6. Additionally, using a torch makes it impossible to sneak up on others in the darkness, which is a liability in dungeon environments. They would want to use the darkness to their advantage against intruders.
I used the old-school term "infravision" in ACKS. My own interpretation of infravision is that it is thermographic vision that relies on ambient infrared emissions. Unlike 21st century thermographic lenses, however, it is not colorized or sharpened, and instead appears as low-resolution grayscale imagery. You cannot read normal-sized writing by it but it's more than sufficient for most purposes of monstrous living.
As the writer, I basically envisioned that most Beastmen don't bother with light sources unless they are really needed for something.
The human bandits need them and some use them for other reasons (cooking fires and such being a good example) but unless it's necessary they don't bother.