NEW PROJECT: The Hurricane Dungeon

My corner of the world got smacked by Hurricane Helene last September. While we were not hit as badly as some neighboring areas, the storm still did a tremendous amount of damage here. We lost power for nine days and internet service for nearly two weeks. Everywhere was trashed by high winds, fallen trees flattened many houses. It felt post-apocalyptic, but everyone stayed cool and we rode everything out as a community. I live in a decent-sized city experiencing rapid growth with lots of outsiders moving in,  but we didn't descend into Mad Max-style pillaging or fortified compound-building. That was reassuring, given my appetite for post-apoc/dystopian sci-fi. While walking through the debris-filled streets to scrounge up some food, I wondered how long that cooperation would last if we all weren't certain things would improve (and could see progress of it every day).

It put me in a D&D frame of mind. It's a given that the first editions of Dungeons & Dragons represented a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Not Earth, but like Earth; enough that the same sorts of cultures, technologies, and gods had developed along nearly identical lines. The vague setting implied in the rules, and also suggested in Gary's tales of his own campaign, involved disparate feudal states clawing their civilizations back from the ruins of previous, more advanced societies. The players took on the roles of explorers setting out into the wild to recover incredible riches, lost knowledge, and forbidden arcane secrets from the ruins. All while the forces of darkness press ever inward on their fragile and isolated kingdoms. Great stuff, ripe for adventure! 

Fortunately, I'd just purchased a physical copy of the three AD&D hardcovers to replace the ones I stupidly sold back when I thought I was done with D&D forever. So, since I had no electricity and little to do at night but read by candlelight, I dove back into the 1e DMG for the first time in 30-ish years. I'd been reading a lot of online discussion about using the random tables to stock dungeons, and I was intrigued by descriptions of how the early dungeons were designed and played. I saw this as a great relearning experience.

My frame of reference for the game was minimal when I began playing Basic D&D in 1981. I'd seen some tantalizing advertisements for it in a few military modeling magazines, but there were no gameplay discussions or other players to teach me. It was just me and my buddy teaching ourselves how to play the game, and swapping DM/player roles to run entire parties through a few of the published adventures (B2, L1, X1, X2). 

When I started playing AD&D with a group of players in 1983, my DM's older brother and his friends had started with OD&D/Judges Guild/Arduin in the mid-late 70s. My DM learned to play at their tables and they passed down to him whatever Ur-knowledge of the game they possessed. I know some of those guys were early in the scene, and went to conventions and knew/had talked to many of the original players and TSR guys, including Gary, so I'm fairly confident they got the game's intent right. The mish-mash of house-rules and variant options they handed off to my DM and which we used, however, makes me certain that I never played "book-accurate" AD&D. The game I'm relearning now is very different from what we played back then.

Darconea's negative 7th level... very dangerous!

In any case, my DM had a mega-dungeon called Darconea, which was created and ruled over by an insane magic-user called The Wizard of Darconea (or WOD as we came to refer to him). It was a 20-level dungeon, with 10 "positive" layers up into Mount Darconea, and 10 "negative" layers below it. The maps were from the Dungeon Geomorph sets, hand-scrawled to modify the layout where needed. The dungeon rooms were keyed on single notecards and filed in multiple card boxes by dungeon level. Each room had something in it (monster, treasure, puzzle, trap, etc.), populated by the random DMG tables. When we cleared a room, he moved the card to the "Used" box and eventually created a new card to restock the room. 

Monsters were drawn from the Monster Manual but also from Chaosium's glorious All the World's Monsters books. Chamber walls, ceilings, and floors were painted with bright colors (rolled from the table in Appendix K), and there was a dungeon mini-game in which WOD awarded prizes to parties who could match colors in a single foray. The more matches, the better the prize. 

The dungeon was maintained by a crew of magical creatures called the Gnomes of Yipuuri (from All the World's Monsters - Vol III), who would appear post-combat, popping out of a hatch and lobbing canisters of scrubbing bubble monsters (also from ATWM) into the room to clean all the viscera and damage. You had to high-tail it out of the area or get scrubbed to death. There was an adventurer's town down on the negative 4th level with a magic item shoppe, and the negative 10th was said to contain a portal to Hell.

Who knows how many real-life hours we spent down in that dungeon, but it was a place we returned to time and again, all well-spent. It was a remarkable place that felt alive and active, dangerous but exhilarating, and oh-so tempting to keep pressing on. "Just a little further," we would cajole each other. So many fun memories and epic battle stories came out of it... stories we still laugh about 40 years later.

At the time, I was aware of all the dungeon tables in the DMG, but never once made actual use of them. As I read them now with fresh eyes (by candlelight, no less), I felt inspired to try my hand at creating a randomly-generated dungeon. Since I can rarely get to sleep before 1 AM, I had nothing else to do in the dark so I got a pencil and graph paper and started rolling some dice. After a few unsatisfactory attempts with the layout tables, I just started sketching free-hand, creating a series of nine maps—one per night—over the power outage period. I was pleased with how they turned out and now wanted to use the random stocking tables to populate the levels.

Once the power came back on, I got busy cleaning up debris and getting things back in order. Then the holidays came and went, and the maps and my intention to do something with them slid to the back burner. I kept thinking about them though, and I've finally decided to do work them up into a proper 9-level dungeon. 

My goal is to hew as closely as possible to the dungeon stocking tables, but not be a slave to them. The tables were only ever meant as guidelines to spur creativity. Gary wanted DMs to use the results as a springboard to riff their own stuff. The challenge I'm setting for myself is to roll on the tables, accept the results as rolled, and then try to fit all the incongruous pieces into some sort of "dungeon logic" that not only feels fantastical and thematic, but also "realistic" (by D&D standards). I want the end product to make sense as an adventuring locale. Forced limitations like these tend to stimulate my creativity in entirely different ways than when I'm just conceptualizing a dungeon theme and populating it accordingly. It's why I enjoy participating in projects like the annual Adventure Site Contest or Dungeon 23.

As of this writing, I have the first 5 levels completely rolled out, plus an exterior area above the dungeon which I added recently. I've written finished keys for the exterior and first 3 levels as well. I've really enjoyed this exercise so far and can't wait to see what the rolls come up with next. Level 4 gets batshit crazy.  I plan to post each of the nine levels (10 counting the exterior) to discuss how the tables rolled out and then drove my creative decisions. I'll also provide share links to download the maps and keys.

Methodology

For my purposes, I'm using the OSRIC tables to determine room contents because I like OSRIC's statistical spread a little more than the DMG's (for example, 60% of AD&D rooms are "Empty," whereas only 35% of OSRIC rooms have nothing in them). I want to use only official AD&D monsters, but from all three monster books, so I created a d12 table to determine which tables I would roll on for each creature: 1–6 = DMG (i.e., Monster Manual); 7–9 = Fiend Folio; 10–12 = Monster Manual II. For determining treasures, I roll 50/50 between OSRIC and DMG (often decided by which book I have open at the moment). OSRIC's tables are great for rolling up traps, tricks, and jewelry items, but I lean on the DMG for gem types and base values. 

As for whether treasures are hidden and/or "guarded" (i.e., trapped), I tweaked the guidance here. Both systems identify these features as optional, but the DMG explicitly makes it an either/or proposition with a single d20 roll: on 1–8, it's "guarded;" on 9–12, it's "hidden." Thus, AD&D treasure would not be both guarded and hidden using just the tables.

OSRIC provides for a 50% chance, but then instructs the DM to consult two tables to determine a treasure's guarding device (trap) AND its method of concealment. This "and" could be interpreted as an "or" in light of the optional nature of both tables. It's also possible to infer that OSRIC means a 50% chance on each table, which would allow for a treasure to be both hidden and trapped as well.

In either case, these features are only meant to be used "if desired" by the DM. I wanted to surrender that decision to a die roll so I simply determined that there was a 50% chance that a treasure was guarded and a 50% chance that it was hidden. This gives me four results: not guarded or hidden; guarded only; hidden only; or both guarded and hidden. It has resulted in a large number of traps which has me wondering about the original nature of dungeon traps versus treasure traps. The random tables only provide a 5% chance for a dungeon location to contain a trick or trap (independent of any treasure), indicating that they are meant to be rare and could even be non-existent on a dungeon level. I may dial the chances for traps or concealment down to 30% each to reduce the total number. (I don't want my players to get overly paranoid about everything being trapped... or do I?)

Same kind of situation with regard to magical treasures. Using OSRIC's spreads, there is a 35% chance for a room to contain a treasure. Of these, only about 6–7% will be magic items. Overwhelmingly, treasure will be items with gold piece value (i.e., experience points). That makes sense and is desirable, but I like doling out magic items, too—especially consumables like potions, scrolls, and wands. My initial rolls turned up very few items, and no magic weapons, even as the monster stocking tables were beginning to produce monsters requiring magic weapons to hit. Level 3 had no magic items on it at all. It felt paltry and disappointing, so I made an executive decision to add magic treasures to each level: two item rolls per dungeon level (so, four extra items on level 2, six on level 3, etc.) Many of these items will be potions and scrolls, statistically, but I will likely cap this number going deeper, as a few of the extra items I've rolled thus far are pretty choice (especially for low levels).

I let the die results stand in most cases, only re-rolling a few results that made no sense (like a string of piercer results in a finished dungeon room), or that were too similar to another roll (like when I rolled 3 different tween rooms on the same level...I'm sorry, that's too many tweens). Some of those results have been wildly swingy (for example, the +4 Leather Armor on level 2), but I'm okay with that. Let's see what happens if the players manage to find it.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 7: The Village of Saltmarsh

Seeing as how I wrote this series of posts in a disorganized manner, it is only fitting that I end it with the starting point—the village of Saltmarsh, the party's home base while they tackle the series of modules U1–U3. Curiously, though the module describes the "little town" as playing a "pivotal role" in the series, with a "web of intrigue" that affects the party's progress, the village is given short shrift in the module's manuscript.

Instead of presenting the village and its inhabitants, the module hands the task of designing the entire thing to the DM, with advice to draw a map, establish the local businesses, and set up the town's council (and its conspirators). Some may see the omission of these details as a flexible advantage for homebrew campaigns, allowing the DM to put his stamp on the adventure; others may see it as a failure of the adventure designer to do their job. It's why you paid money for the module, right?

Interestingly, the basic "plot" of Saltmarsh is similar to the Sample Dungeon's "plot" of Portown (smugglers using nearby sea caves to run their operation, in collusion with local bribed officials), so those two pieces clicked together very well, along with new details from Zach Howard's Forgotten Smugglers' Cave adjunct. I took the background information from those three sources and crafted my own background "plot" to account for the various adventure areas of the site. 

I started the campaign without a map of the village. Instead, I gave the party a handout list of the main buildings in town along with a brief description and details about what can be acquired/accomplished in each place. This was my tabletop group's first experience with playing early-edition D&D (Advanced Labyrinth Lord in this case), so I explained that town wasn't really a place for adventure but more of an abstract base for their characters to rest and reset between sessions.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 6: The Naga's Lair

 

 

This penultimate post represents the final piece of the kilodungeon site. It uses the dungeon portion of the original AD&D adventure: N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile Gods. I'm actually not a big fan of the module as published. It's very railroady, and the cult activities in the village of Orlane are meh. The actual naga's lair with the troglodytes is pretty well done, however, and it snaps perfectly into the overall site concept. 

Its inclusion also gives me a third "faction boss" to use as a counterweight to the two magic-users competing over the site. She is gathering her forces to first take over the Sea Caves level and expel the pirates, then take control of the Dungeon level to capture its wealth and power. Once she accomplishes all that, she will send her enthralled human minions to subvert and undermine local authorities, and take over the human settlements in this desolate region on the periphery of civilization.

The entrance to this site is down in the swamp below the manor bluff, but anyone looking off the cliff can potentially catch a glimpse of the berm. The entrance can be reached either by sea or by scaling down the steep slope to the NE. There is also a back way into the dungeon via the Sea Caves level. In fact, several of the naga's minions are enthralled pirates who were captured in those caves by her troglodyte agents.

I got rid of everything in the module up to the naga's lair, though I kept some of the swamp description and its wandering encounter table. I added two other entries—a mud viper and 1–3 giant lizards—to make for an even six encounters, and I renamed the module's 1 HD "giant leech" (AD&D) to a "huge leech" instead (Labyrinth Lord's giant leeches are 6 HD creatures).

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 5: The Estate Grounds

Although this is Part 5, the following material is actually the third section of my dungeon notes. I had no real plan going into this series of posts so I didn't consider a logical order of information before diving in with the manor house in Part 1. In my writeup, section 1 is the Intro and Background, section 2 is the Village of Saltmarsh, section 3 is the Estate Grounds and Manor House, section 4 is the Dungeon level, section 5 is the Sea Caves level, section 6 is the Forgotten Caves level, and section 7 is the Naga Lair.

With the Estate Grounds, my intention was to create areas of interest in the property around the Manor House, mainly to provide a more organic entrance into the overall site and to facilitate multiple entrances into the various dungeon levels. The map of the grounds started as a "sketch" in my head that I transferred straight onto the battlemat during the opening session. (Ignore the compass rose in this image; I flipped the site's orientation after this point.)

Original Estate Map (scale = ~50' hexes)

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 4: The Forgotten Caves

Finally getting back to this series after reviewing thirty submissions for Ben Gibson's Adventure Site Contest 2, including my own submission. No winner(s) have been announced yet as the final reviews continue to trickle in, but I'll certainly post the big announcement when it happens (should be soon).

In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, I described several of the major pieces of a kilodungeon I smashed together from various old adventures: specifically the Manor House and Sea Caves from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and the Sample Dungeon from the Holmes Basic Rulebook. Part of the Sea Caves level borrowed a few rooms from a third dungeon—Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves. This post will cover the remainder of that dungeon, which is situated between the Zenopus Dungeon level and the Sea Caves.

Since Zach has already written up this entire thing on his own blog, I don't want to repeat too much here if I can help it. Instead, I have received the author's permission to reference his material so I'll simply cover the things I changed or added to suit my own purposes. I didn't change very much of the content, as the adventure is already well-designed; I simply reworked the map to fit the other levels, and integrated the material into my backstory of the site, tweaking a few things here and there to make it better fit the overall dungeon concept.

The original Forgotten Smugglers' Caves (FSC) is an add-on to Holmes' Sample Dungeon, taking the details of the smugglers' cave and imagining a whole hideout, abandoned long ago due to a curse perhaps laid upon the caves by Zenopus himself. The Sample Dungeon sits below the seaside village of Portown in the original writeup, and characters can find info about the FSC there.

Owlbear Hill — Adventure Site Contest 2 Post-Mortem

My reviews of submissions for the Adventure Site Contest 2 are complete, my scores are turned in, and I've spent some time reflecting on what I learned from the experience, both as judge and adventure site designer.

Thanks to the other judges: Ben Gibson, BX Blackrazor, Owen Edwards, and Grützi for their kind and fair words about this adventure, and for all the hard work they put in to conduct their contest reviews. I was honored to be asked to judge, and I hope I brought something helpful to the table. 

Also, congratulations to all the contest entrants. I've said before that it takes a lot of guts to write something and put it out there for other randos to critique. I have respect for every author and encourage everyone to keep writing, as all the entries had good, creative stuff in them.

Yes, my reviews were nit-picky, far more than I am in "real life," and yes, they were long-winded, but I believe it's more important for the author to hear what doesn't work than it is to hear what does. Criticism, not praise, is the entire point of the editorial (judging) process. And to make sure the criticism is sound, you have to dig into the details and tear things apart to get at them. 

I went through each submission with a fine-toothed comb and double-checked the rulebooks (where I could) to form my critical questions. Often, I found the answers; sometimes, I found new questions. I put everything out there in terms of what I noticed, even if it was nit-picky, off-base, or purely personal opinion. Everyone's tastes are different and I'm just some guy on the internet, so the stakes of my criticism are low. My only goal was to give an honest and thorough evaluation of each site, from the perspective of a DM preparing to run it in a few hours.

The most valuable lessons about professional writing I ever learned were from the experienced editors who were hardest on my work. Their lessons stay with you, help you recognize the same mistakes next time before you make them. I certainly carry them over into my own editorial duties, contest or otherwise, and I hope all the authors take my reviews in that spirit. 

In the spirit of accountability, on the other hand, I thought it would be fun to apply some of the same critical standards I used for the contest submissions to my own work. I won't be scoring the categories numerically, of course, because I already think my adventure is GREAT! 5 out of 5!! 

Kidding, of course. There are actually lots of flaws and things that bothered me about my entry, regrets big and small, and could-have-beens that I forced myself to live with to meet the contest guidelines. Instead of giving it a score, I'll discuss my personal satisfaction with the results. I'm also including some design notes and elaborating on the original writeup. Stuff that might help someone trying to run it better understand my intentions. 

Since the methods I use for judging are subjective, I'm going to apply some of the questions/criticisms from other judges to test my creative premises. This is for no other reason than to have something to bounce off as a discussion point, because it represents something in my writeup that probably needs clarification. I accept their critique as 100% valid and agree with most of it—and much of it was positive—but where I can provide an explanation for my creative choices, I will.

 Onward!

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Warm Caves of the Ts'ai Dragons

I can't quite believe it, but here we are at the last Adventure Site Contest 2 review. This has been an interesting ride, and I plan to post some follow-up thoughts on the experience after taking a step back and considering what I've learned. It's been eye-opening, frankly, and has made me reconsider how I go about my own dungeon designs. I'll expound further, but congratulations to everyone who submitted something this year. It was a distinct honor to be chosen as a worthy judge, so I hope I've lived up to expectations.

On with the review!

The Warm Caves of the Ts'ai Dragons

Author: Sneedler Chuckworth
System: OD&D
Party Size: ?
Level Range: 5-7

There is no introductory text. The writeup simply plops the reader into a list of adventure hooks. In the first one, an evil wizard offers to train the party's magic-users for free if they retrieve an important document. The second hook is a treasure map to the location of powerful magic arrows. The third and last hook is a report about a dragon running amok in the hinterlands.

So, the first hook sets the tone for the text. The "dread wizard Zothblimzo" desires an arcane treatise written by his hated rival Forxximon, another magic-user. The names are goofy and tricky to pronounce, but I don't mind that so much. It does suggest that Sneedler Chuckworth's adventure isn't taking itself seriously, which can work if handled properly. The unseriousness is reinforced with the subject of the desired treatise regarding "the mating habits of Fire Elementals." Hm.