[Dungeon] Secret Hide-Out of GLAXORZIS, that Sorcerous CREEP!

I drew and wrote a quick little dungeon by hand, in that foldable pocketmod format.

GRAB IT HERE FOR THE PRICE OF FREE!

What it says on the tin! 

You are after GLAXORZIS, THAT SORCEROUS CREEP, who wronged you somehow. Kidnapped your friend, stole your shiny artifact, played a stupid prank on you. Follow him underground into a complex of 21 rooms spread out over three levels. 

This is a barebones thingie, printable/foldable as a pocketmod. 

No stats. For fantasy adventure games where you die in a hole.

[Dungeon] Hole of the Goblin King

Buckle up and put on some Grieg, we are going on a trip to the Hall of the Mountain King! ...what? The DM blew all our money on novelty dice and now we can only afford infiltrating the Hole of the Goblin King? Uhhh I guess that's our life now.

Hole of the Goblin King is a dungeon I drew and wrote by hand. 18 keyed areas of an underground lair. I guess it's what you *might* call "vanilla fantasy", because it's about goblins in a hole, with by-the-book stuff. It has kind of a whimsical/tongue-in-cheek tone. Leveld 2-3? 

Anyway, this was FUN. You should have more FUN.

Full res scan here

[Dungeon] Delver's Delight - "lost world" level complete!

Another update to my dungeon, Delver's Delight! This time I added a large "lost world" style level, called Land of Dusk. It has a stronger overarching theme than the previous dungeony dungeon levels. Weird dino jungle & lake in a hollow earth cavity!

This is Level 3A.

Level 3B is also in the works, it's a dungeon/fortress area that connects up with the Land of Dusk.

Grab it here!

[Dungeon] Delver's Delight, a very dungeony dungeon, now with a second level!

I added level 2 to Delver's Delight! 32 more rooms. The method and feel are similar: traps, monsters, weird rooms, it doesn't make too much sense, but it's fun... I use random generators to get going and fill up rooms, then refine them, add more ideas.

Grab it here!

[Dungeon] Delver's Delight, Level 1 - a very dungeony dungeon adventure!

I made a dungeon module. It's very "dungeony", it doesn't have much logic or reason behind it, but it has fun rooms, traps, treasure and monsterrrrs. Stocked with OSRIC/AD&D.

Update, Oct. 8, 2023: NOW WITH TWO LEVELS!

GRAB IT HERE!

Have fun!

[Map] LEG DAY! The Dungeon of Stairs

I drew a slightly ridiculous dungeon map - a level chock-full of stairs leading up and down. Ridiculous as this map is, I do like certain parts, like the bridge/tower above the water caves in the north-east corner (#32-32).

I don't have keys or even a particular concept. I guess this dungeon was built by creatures who just LOVE stairs. So, this isn't a great fit for Barsoom (where they use ramps instead of stairs). 

Or for certain areas of Jane Gaskell's The Serpent:

'Now we should like to see our rooms,' Zerd said.

The governor led him over to the staircase - the more menial of us followed closely, the rest trailed behind or simply didn't bother - and the governor stood aside to let his guests precede him. I ran up, two steps at a time, and only when I was at the top did I realise that everyone else was still at the bottom.

They all stood quiet, with upturned faces, then gasped.

'What's the matter?' I said, feeling appallingly self-conscious alone at the top there. T'm sorry, I thought we were supposed to come up here - ' and I began to descend again, feeling the blushes rising up my throat and scorching my cheeks.

'How do you do it?' 'Where did you learn?' said several voices.

'Learn what?' I asked, most embarrassed.

'She ran up, two at a time,' said someone.

I was now at the bottom and a crowd of winegirls ran forward cheering me, and Isad came up, dripping wet, hooting on his pet horn. Lara looked sour.

'Do it again, do it again!' cried the winegirls to me.

'What is it?' I said.

'You're so fast, could you do it again just as fast?'

'Of course, my country is full of stairs. Our houses are often four-storeyed - aren't yours?'

'No,' Zerd said. 'We don't have stairs in the North. Do it again, Cija, it's fascinating to watch.'

So I ran up and down the stairs for them twice more, and they cheered me and chanted compliments, and at last all trooped up after me.

This version has the relative depth of areas:

[Dungeon] Temple of the Forgotten God

This is a 16-room dungeon I wrote in about an hour for the OSR discord's community hexcrawl. I thought I would share it here too. Meat & potatoes OD&D-style experience. Minimal keying. Have fun!

Download as PDF here!

(now with enhanced map)

Update: enhanced map!

All rooms are hewn from the black basalt of the mountain. Ceilings are 8’ high unless otherwise noted. Doors are stone slabs that slide into the wall. One square = 10’.

Wandering monsters (2d4):

2 2 Robots in love

3 Black Pudding

4 1-10 Pixies

5 2-8 Reptiloids

6 2-12 Koblins

7 1-4 Vampire Bats

8 Time-travelling Thaumaturgist

Areas:

0. Entrance Chamber

The double doors are voice operated (react to OPEN and CLOSE commands uttered in the language of the Ancients). Labored breathing of a large creature can be heard beyond the second set of doors.

1. Trapped Dragon

20’ high ceiling held up by red pillars. Emaciated Adult Red Dragon (half HD), trapped here a decade ago by a cunning adventurer who knew the command words. The monster cannot fit through the doors towards #2 or #5. Small hoard of 1200 gp in the corner.

2. Trophy Room

Rusty weapons and shields (2 swords and 3 shields salvageable) on the walls. Thick layer of dust everywhere: trace of an approx. 3’ object dragged towards #4.

3. Locked Storage

Secret door: ventilation duct 6’ above the floor leads to a 4’ wide passage.

4. Drippy Area

Weird lemony green ooze drips from the walls. The object dragged over from #2 is a 3’ square extremely durable, yet light metal plate with handles.

5. Transitory Room

Doors to rooms #6-8 painted Orange, Yellow, Black.

6. Orange Door Room

Empty.

7. Yellow Door Room

6 Ghouls, transfixed, staring at a grainy TV screen. 

8. Black Door Room

Dark & squalid, walls painted black. Secret door: outline barely traceable below thick black varnish.

9. Healing Pool

Eerie blue glowing water. Murals on the walls depict nymphs bathing – sometimes laughter can be heard! A creature fully submerged in the water for 1 hour regains d4 hit points and, if poisoned, can repeat the save (this healing procedure is only effective 1/week). Partial submersion can lead to weird mutations.

10. Rug Maze

Garishly patterned rugs and curtains hang everywhere. Total value: 500 gp.

11. Crate Maze

Crates stacked high, easy to topple. 9 Dervishes lurk here, their leader holds the Pipes of Slumber (Sleep spell 1/day, but the wielder doesn’t heal from resting). 

12. Generator

Entrance partially obscured by crates. 10 Large Centipedes warming around an energy generator.

13. The Bone Gang

Entrance partially obscured by crates. 8 Skeletons, clearly a former group of adventurers (2 “fighters” with swords and shields, 1 “cleric” with mace and “unholy symbol”, 1 “magic-user” with a staff and a Scroll of Magic Missile, 4 “henchmen” with burnt-out torches and empty sacks). They guard a chest containing 4 rubies (500 gp ea.) and a gilded silver goblet (200 gp).

14. Ape Nest

Pool of dried blood before entrance. 2 White Apes lounging on dirty hay.

15. Wolf Lair

3 Giant Wolves, their hides colored blue (same hue as the pool in #9).

16. Garage

Functioning anti-grav skiff, with enough fuel for 2 days of operation. Seats 2 people.

PARALLEL DUNGEONS - a dimension-shifting OSR adventure

I wrote a new adventure! It is a gimmicky one, but also playable & fun. Imagine that there are three dungeons that occupy the same physical space, and the player characters can shift between these three parallel dimensions by using a device. The three dungeons are quite different:

1. Cave of the Demon Corsairs = hide-out of brutal pirates in pact with dark forces
2. Mining Tunnels of Q-3296 = abandoned asteroid mining operation
3. Tranquility & Transcendence = monastery of meditating monks

The area descriptions are presented in three parallel columns, so whenever the party shifts to a different dimension, you can just look to the next column and find the area's description in the parallel dungeon.

I ran a playtest in Esoteric Enterprises, the players were the commando unit of an occult secret agency. They were taken to an island to explore the weird caves. The pirate and asteroid parts proved quite deadly... but the dimension shifting device saved the party's asses a couple of times, and they also used it to circumvent hazards.

Get in on itch.io! (free/PWYW)

Quick humanoid lair generator for wilderness stocking

This is a dead simple generator of wilderness lairs. Good for stocking a big hexcrawl map or for on-the-fly use. This is where your tribe of orcs or gobs or human bandits live.

1. Roll d66 for the Lair location.
2. Roll d66 twice for some extra Details about the inhabitants of the Lair.

Lair location: 

	Type	1	2	3	4	5	6
1	Cave	Flooded	Gorge	Grotto	Cave system	Mine	Dungeon
2
3	Camp	No shelter	Lean-to	Tent		Hovel	Military
4	Ruin	Homestead	Tower	Shrine	Manor	Outpost	Settlement
5
6	Structure

For Ruin and Structure, the first die also indicates the overall size of the building (4 – small, 5 – medium, 6 – large).

Details:

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1	Plague	Curse	Haunting	Inner strife	Leaderless	Starving
2	Recently defeated	Low morale	Fleeing	Lost	Traitor in ranks	No offspring
3	Spring	Stream	Pond	Waterfall	Well	Ample food
4	Valuable resource	Workshop	Prisoners	Traps	Mounts or vehicles	Livestock
5	Co-habit with different type	Talented storyteller	Talented healer	Talented magic-user	Leader of different type	Allied with local faction
6	Superior weaponry	Double treasure	Magic item	Cult idol	Sacrificial altar	Ley-line nexus

 

A couple of examples (for the numbers and the monster types, I just used the wilderness encounter generator from OSE):

• [55, 16, 66] In the hills, 115 Kobolds occupy in a medium-sized ruined outpost. They are starving, but won't move on because they live atop a sweet ley-line nexus.
• [11, 13, 26] In the swamps, 25 Trolls live in a flooded cave. At nights, the ghost of a devoured victim haunts them. They do not have children.
• [45 65, 64] In the forest, 150 Brigands squat in a small ruined outpost. They are actually cultists, and have set up a foul idol and a sacrificial altar to their god Stand-and-Deliver.
• [62, 35, 46] In the jungle, 85 Elves live in and around a large tower. They dug a deep well in the basement - the only source of clean, germ-free water in the fetid jungle. They have a herd of herbivorous dinosaurs (a source of meat and eggs).

See more fully worked examples under this tag.

[Dungeon] Maze of Amazement ( & Death ), one-page adventure for OD&D/Delving Deeper

So, if keying the entirety of The Maddening Corridors of Nuclear Chaos is not really a viable option, what can we do with it?

Well, we can cut it up and use a part of it as a complete dungeon!

I divided up The Maddening Corridors map into 36 quadrants, took a random one (by rolling two six-siders), cut it into half, edited out some errant corridors and superfluous exits; and ended up with a 60-ish room dungeon.

The next step of the exercise was to key it. I followed the basic procedure of my two previous OD&D efforts (Temple of the Berserkers and Outpost of Stone & Silver): stocked it quickly using Delving Deeper (made even quicker through Inspiration Pad Pro automation), then edited as needed...

You can fit 61 rooms on a single page... Of course, the key becomes very minimal, but still, I think this is playable. See for yourselves:

Download PDF with map & key!

Enjoy!

UPDATE 2025: A Level 3 Dork turned this into The Lair of the Serpent Men! Compare & contrast to see how far a little re-skinning can take you in making a dungeon your own.

How much D&D can one find in Appendix N?

Obviously, there are a lot of motifs from Appendix N literature in D&D. But how much D&D is there in Appendix N literature? Myriad traces of myriad pulp fantasy/horror/sci-fi works have made their way into the DNA of D&D; but at the same time not many texts feel completely like a D&D session. Which is logical, of course: what works as a game session is not necessarily enjoyable literature. But as an exercise, I thought it would be fun to set up a scale of just how “D&D-like” is a particular text. This is not a score about the literary merits or whatever of the works. It is correspondence to the specific and somewhat arbitrary idea of a D&D session, formulated as:

“A group of adventurers tracks through a wilderness, descends into a dungeon, explores a place of weirdness and wonder, tries to overcome obstacles and monstrous enemies through cunning, martial prowess and magic, retrieves treasure.”

I broke down this description into 10 categories, took three short stories I like, and scored them:

	“The Weaver in the Vault” by Clark Ashton Smith (1934)	“The Jewels of Bas” by Leigh Brackett (1944)	“Straggler from Atlantis” by Manly Wade Wellman (1977)
Group of adventurers	1	1	0
Wilderness	1	0.5	0
Dungeon	1	1	1
Weirdness & Wonder	1	1	1
Obstacles	0	1	0
Monsters	1	1	1
Cunning	1	1	1
Martial prowess	0	0	1
Magic	0	0.5	0
Treasure	1	1	1
Final score	7/10	8/10	6/10

 

“The Weaver in the Vault” by Clark Ashton Smith stars “three of the king’s hardiest henchmen” on a quest to retrieve a mummy from the ruins of a royal tomb. If this isn’t a D&D setup, then what is? The wilderness track is cool, my favorite part is when they rest at the “wayside shrine of Yucla, the small and grotesque god of laughter”. Also, spoiler: it ends in a TPK (they should have thought about party balance! Three fighting-men…). [read it online!]

“The Jewel of Bas” by Leigh Brackett starts out with just two “adventurers” (a bard and a thief!), but along the way they pick up a rag-tag team of outcasts (like an insane hermit and a hunter). The monster section is great: there are low-level mooks (the Kalds), Big Bads (the androids), and even a high-powered NPC. The wilderness is mostly a scenery, not really interacted with. The dungeon is very cool, and there’s lots of weirdness, much of it rather dangerous. [read it online!]

“Straggler from Atlantis” by Manly Wade Wellman has a single main protagonist, which is, of course, not very D&D-like. And he faces the monster without bringing henchmen or torchbearers, the fool! Still, the story (which has a great Odyssey feel) has a small cave dungeon, an interesting monster (alien ooze!), nice NPCs, and a capable cunning warrior. [buy digital/print]

[Dungeon] Temple of the Berserkers, one-page OD&D adventure

 As a little exercise, I drew a dungeon and stocked it according to the guidelines in the 3 original Dungeons & Dragons booklets. Behold, the Temple of the Berserkers!

Download PDF with map & key!*

(for a one-page adventure, print "2 pages on 1 sheet")

* 2020.08.11 - updated the file with a new map and a couple of minor edits.
Big thanks to John Bragg for spotting the error in the elevation levels!

* 2020.08.24 - now with a players' map, with traps, secret doors and labels hidden!

Workflow:

I started with the map (because I love drawing maps). 40-ish rooms, interconnections, etc., and I added some features like statues and secret doors right away. Then I reserved the bigger or more peculiar rooms as "specials", but didn't put anything in them yet.

Instead, I went through the rest of the areas, stocking them randomly, as a level 1 dungeon. The OD&D procedure is clunky (and can be substituted with a single-roll stocking method), but I used it more or less as written. Next, I rolled up random monsters for each populated room.

At this point, due to a freak coincidence, I rolled Berserkers three times. And so, a theme emerged. A temple/dungeon mostly overtaken by Berserkers, and a couple of other creatures and NPCs, who are either their leaders, allies, or, in some cases, enemies they can't get rid of.

With this theme set and most rooms stocked, I returned to the specials and adjusted them to fit the theme (or not fit the theme, as OD&D dungeons are not supposed to be all logical...). 

I like how it all came out and it was fun to make. Enjoy!

[Actual Play] D&D Campaign Re-cap, 2017-2018 - PART 1 [5e]

My current long-running campaign is a game of fifth edition D&D with some friends. We started it in 2017. The first long adventure took us about 12 sessions (in about 10 months), most of them conducted online (due to everybody living in different places), but with the "finale" (an epic 6-hour long double feature!) played out in person - which was actually a very nice thing.

So I'm writing a re-cap! I cannot do it session-by-session, because this all took part over the course of a year, and I don't have exact notes, so I will just summarize what I remember.

The setting is on the low-fantasy side of things, all homebrew, I flesh it out gradually as we go, adding in elements when needed. Tone-wise, I try to keep things weird and unusual; but not overtly horrific or grimdark.

Characters:

• Gawin, Dragonborn Ranger, who was brought up by humans, and became the protector/folk hero of his small village
• Jandar, Tiefling Paladin, from the Order of Monos (an outdated archaic order of self-appointed judges and avengers; hated by most) (yes, he is Hellboy)
• Tofu-san, Forest Gnomesse Monk, aficionado of fine herbs, calligraphy and meditation
• Avi, Human Wizard, comes from a noble family, studies at a battle wizard academy, loves to party, dresses with style

All characters started at Level 1. Player-experience-wise, the group is quite mixed. Two people have been playing for almost 20 years (the players of Jandar and Avi). The two other player were essentially new to the game. Gawin's player started recently in another campaign. For Tofu-san's player, this was the very first experience of RPGs ever - so I ran a short intro/prologue for her.

Tofu-san's prologue:

It started with Tofu-san, a travelling hermit, camping in the forest. At night she was attacked by a small but vicious humanoid creature (a Fey darkling). They fought, and Tofu-san pinned her enemy to the ground and interrogated him. The creature turned out to be on a ritual mission: his task was to kill a person, in order to be initiated into the senior ranks of his tribe. Tofu-san let him go, but the creature attacked again. Tofu-san didn't want to kill him, so just tied him up and took away his weapons, and left him behind.

Some time later, Tofu-san fell asleep between the roots of the huge old tree. She had a vision or a lucid dream. In the dream, she was in an underground cave system. She explored it a bit, then followed a narrow passage, and arrived into an almost perfectly spherical small room. There was a hole in the ground. She knelt down and looked into the hole --- and she found herself staring into the abyss, the infinite cosmic void. She sensed a terrible malevolent presence between the stars, reaching towards her.

She woke abruptly, holding a polished pitch-black pebble in her hand.

Early sessions:

The early sessions were just Gawin, Jandar and Tofu-san. Avi joined later.

The set-up: It all started in a big city called Voln. Voln is menaced by a series of earthquakes, unnatural freak events. Part of the city was in ruins, people are in panic. Even worse, dangerous creatures swarmed forth from the underground crevices. The city council was in dire need of people to help secure the city and combat the monsters.

Jandar, Gawin and Tofu-san agreed to help. They had the motivations to do so. Partially because of the small fee attached. Partially for their own personal reasons. Jandar's Order has a collection of prophecies, and one of these prophecies tells about earthquakes and the "wisdom that hides in the rifts". Gawin's home village was also hit by an earthquake, and rotting undead spewed forth from the split ground. Gawin the folk hero fought them, and then decided to do the same at the city. Tofu-san had a feeling that the cavern she had seen in her vision/dream might be in the newly found passages under the city.

Thus, the first two or three sessions were spent exploring a dungeon, made up of parts of the city and its buildings that collapsed into the underground cavities. So it was a nice mix of architecture, transformed and mingled by the quakes, and natural caverns. One of the running themes was the correlation of what's overground and what's underground. Where it was possible, the characters tried to orient themselves based on what they see in the collapsed underground parts. They explored the remnants of a collapsed alchemist's workshop (fighting an ooze). They found some big underground caverns, with roots hanging from the ceiling - which they figured must have been somewhere under the city park - and got into some fights with some purple mushrooms.

They also found a corridor, leading up towards the ground. The corridor was weird, twisted. Just looking at it caused headaches for some reason. It led to a cellar, that had a huge magic circle drawn on the ground... The characters failed to understand its function, but broke it - just in case. They also copied some of the glyphs for further research. They understood that this cellar must belong to one of the city's buildings, but couldn't go up, because of the rubble covering the cellar's trapdoor from above.

I gradually started piling on more weird stuff. The fungal theme was expanded with mushroom-controlled zombie-like humanoids, who were guarding certain areas.  The players also found places where mushrooms were clearly "planted" and cultivated, by the unknown inhabitants of these tunnels. The characters killed a few fungal zombies, but also learned that by destroying the mushroom-infestation, the zombies revert back to non-aggressive (although sick and unconscious) humanoids. The group decided to save one of these ex-zombies, and took him back to the surface, where a small hospital was set up for earthquake survivors.

While exploring the passages, the characters also started noticing strange distortions of space. They called them "soft spots". Essentially these were small invisible portals all over the caves, which had random connections between them. If you squeezed yourself into one of the holes, you'd pop out of a different, randomly determined one, possibly in a different area of the dungeon. Alas, travel between these "soft spots" was dangerous: Jandar, for example, was attacked by some unknown force while traversing the black void inbetween two portals, but survived.

The group started experimenting with the "soft spots", and ended up in a hitherto unexplored hall of the caves, where they encountered some humanoids. They looked like the fungal zombies from before, but were instead sentient and, well, non-zombies. The characters tried to communicate with them. The humanoids answered, but they spoke a rather archaic and almost incomprehensible version of the currently spoken common language. So the players had to resort to using just basic vocabulary, which was understandable by both (like "home", "food"...). Basically they learned that these people live in a cave system, don't even know that there is supposed to be a city above them... They explained that they have their own city, somewhere even deeper underground, and showed the players that the passage leading there has collapsed due to the earthquakes, essentially cutting them off from their homes (their place is a guardpost of sorts, next to the mushroom farms).

The player characters explored some more passages of the dungeon. In the collapsed shop of a diviner, Mme. Xanadu, they encountered a group, led by a dwarf. The dwarf (who introduced himself as Veid) claimed to be looking for his brother, who disappeared during the earthquakes. The player characters promised to alert him if they find a dwarf in the tunnels. Veid and his companions retreated.

After some more exploration, they happened upon a cave area that Tofu-san recognized from her dream/vision. All the stalactites and other details were in place --- expect for one, the small spherical room with the "window" overlooking the cosmic void...

They backtracked and followed some other paths, and soon found a cave passage that led to the cavern that they accessed before through the portal. But the cave-dwellers from before were dead, their throats cut! The corpses were fresh, still warm, so the players looked for the assassins, and in the dark caves, were attacked by a small coterie of creatures. Tofu-san recognized not just the type, but one of the individual creatures as her attacker from back from the prologue. The Darkling came back to retry its failed initiation/assassination attempt, but this time with a couple of friends. After a tough and sneaky fight, the players killed most Darklings, but captured one. Turned out, the creatures got into the tunnels through a portal they found in the forest - under the tree where (as she recognized by the description) Tofu-san rested. The forest is actually a good hundred miles from the city, so the portals/"soft spots" system is bigger than they suspected...

With this, the players have exhausted most of the accessible passages, and returned to the surface, to claim their small reward - but also to think about what to do next. The cave system clearly held more mysteries then it first seemed, and the earthquakes didn't seem natural either.

To be continued...