The Heart of St. Althus for OSRIC Is Now Available at DriveThruRPG

My latest adventure is now live on Drive-Thru RPG. I discussed the background and development of this one in an earlier post, so here's the cover and a few sample pages to check out.

 

Below Gwarnath – Level 1 Latest Progress

The Heart of St. Althus has been uploaded to Drive-Thru RPG, so while I'm waiting for it to be approved for sale, I turned attention back to developing my next campaign's mega-dungeon. Since my last post, I've filled in zones C, D, H, and I (including some creep back into neighboring zones that still had room to squeeze in some more dungeon).

Other than the four initial zones, I haven't rolled out any of the contents of the keyed areas yet, as I'm still developing customized tables for this campaign. I intend to stock each zone individually and post about the results when I get to that point. Below is a look at the map thus far, and here's a link to a higher-res (7500 x 7500 px) version.

To this point, I've been using the OSRIC tables to generate everything, but the more comfortable I get with these tables and the ones in the DMG, I'm liking the DMG version more. One of my main complaints about OSRIC's tables over the DMG's is one little result on one table. When following the course of a dungeon passage, you make a roll at the end of each corridor length to determine what's next. It's called "Table 18: General" in OSRIC, while in the DMG it's called "Table I.: Periodic Check."

They largely mirror each other, with the main differences being the placement and percentages for the same line items (for example, OSRIC provides for a 25% chance to come across a door, compared to the DMG's 15% chance). I'm dissatisfied with the OSRIC table due to the absence of the "Trick/Trap" result from the DMG. I've read that many of the little math differences in OSRIC come down to not wanting to emulate AD&D too closely, so perhaps that's the reason it wasn't included in this table, but I'm missing the presence of the occasional hallway trap.

I don't like the Wandering Monster result in both tables, either. I think it's there to facilitate solo play, but that's a different procedure than generating a dungeon, one that's already accounted for elsewhere in the rules. Is a solo player ALSO rolling an encounter check every proscribed period? In any case, I don't get it. So, as a compromise, I've decided to continue using the OSRIC tables, but treating all "Wandering Monster" results as a "Trick/Trap" instead. Same percentage chance as in the DMG, too.

I'm well into mapping zone L, and now that I've completed my latest publishing project, I may start properly keying the map soon as a test run for my new encounter tables. 

In addition to working on this, I've begun work on my next adventure for publication, an update to/adaptation of an older adventure entitled "Bugspittle's Hive." I'll have more to say on it in the near future, but it's a magical fairy mound full of insect ickyness. I've often referred to it as a "spiritual sequel" to "Etta Capp's Cottage."

The Heart of St. Althus – Finished Cover

Cover illustration is done, and the manuscript is complete and formatted. I'm giving it one final review and then I'll upload the file to Drive-Thru this weekend. Should be available sometime next week.

Adventure Sites III Now Available on DriveThru RPG

Coldlight Press has put the Adventure Site Contest III compilation up on Drive-Thru RPG, featuring the top-rated 8 submissions (out of 30 total). My submission, Ophidian Temple, is one of them. The price is FREE, so check it out if you want some good creative sites to drop in your campaign for your players to visit.

Also, my adventure, Aethelberd's Tomb, received a "No Regerts" ranking on tenfootpole.org. Woot!

The Heart of St. Althus – Cover Progress

My upcoming adventure was formerly known by its casual campaign name, The Haunted Chapel. I didn't really need to call it anything else, as I knew what the name referred to. I wanted a more interesting title for publication, however, so I renamed it after the holy relic enshrined inside the temple: The Heart of St. Althus.

Recovering the relic may or may not be the explicit goal of the adventure, depending on how the DM running it wants to involve the party in investigating the site. They may not even be aware the relic exists at the start of the adventure, but its presence in this site will be felt almost immediately by any Good clerics who enter the area. The item is based on a real-life holy relic: The Preserved Heart of St. Camillus.

I considered several ideas for the cover. One was an image of the chapel ruins, to give players a visual reference of the site, similar to what I did for the cover of Bergummo's Tower. Another idea was an action scene of some of the monsters encountered in the undercroft, like the Aethelberd's Tomb cover.

I ultimately went with an image of the relic as it seemed like an easier (and quicker) thing to illustrate, so I drew a quick sketch:

After scanning the sketch and drawing some blue lines for perspective, I converted the sketch into the basic shapes of the illustration. I still have lots of details to incorporate, and then need to color the whole thing, but its taking shape nicely, I think.

Below Gwarnath – Level 1 Map Progress

The manuscript and maps for my next published adventure are complete, and I'm in the process of drawing the cover illustration. I don't quite know if I'll make my self-imposed, end-of-April deadline, but I'm happy with where I am. I'm confident I'll have it up on Drive-thru in the next two weeks.

In the meantime, I needed a creative palate cleanser, so I resumed work on my Below Gwarnath megadungeon map. I'm drawing this using the random dungeon generation tables in OSRIC, and I'm developing some custom stocking tables to incorporate specific monsters and magic items (and tech items from Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha), plus a ton of homebrew material from old, unused campaign ideas. I still haven't decided if I'm unleashing this on my tabletop group or my Roll20 guys.

As I said in my introductory post, I started this map to give me a little test-bed dungeon to show one of my 5e guys what AD&D/OSRIC is like. We have yet to play that session, but I enjoyed the dungeon generation process so much that I kept going. Before long, I had four interconnected maps, each on a 24x24 grid, with branches leading off-map in all directions. I placed those four maps at the center of a larger canvas of sixteen, 24x24 grid "zones" (the whole image is 24" x 24", or 7200 x 7200 px). The following maps are all lo-res, as I had to shrink them quite a bit to upload to the blog, but I'll post a link to the full-size map at the bottom.

I've posted this version previously but want to show the progression, so this is the map I had after the initial burst of generation. The original zone I drew for the playtest was F, followed by G, J, and K (I'd already strayed into zones A and B by this point, as well).

My intention for the next bit of mapping was to finish filling out zones A and B, then move methodically to C, D, E, etc. But the randomness of the dice carried me down into zones E and I, before bringing me back up to A. This is roughly 2 or 3 sessions of casual mapping from the tables (a few hours' work, tops) at the beginning of April..

I shelved the map for a bit while I worked on my new adventure, but we had some relief over the weekend from the drought in our area with a nice steady rain, so I spent the day indoors and got some more mapping done by finishing out zone B. I decided to make the outside borders of this map the outer limit of the dungeon area, so any results that carried me off the larger map were either ignored or diverted. I had to tweak a few results to get certain areas to fit what had already been drawn, but I remain amazed at how the tables just WORK to create these spaces. Quite ingenious.

 

The only zone I've actually stocked and keyed so far is the original one, zone F, that I did for the OSRIC playtest. It was also rolled out using purely the OSRIC tables, but it wasn't written with the full blown concept I've since designed for this future campaign in mind. It's more similar to the approach I took with the Hurricane Dungeon, which was to populate the level with little, independent vignettes connected only by the shared environment. There's no big theme running, here, just day-to-day survival for the dungeon inhabitants. I may revisit the key once I get my stocking tables where I want them, but this is my interpretation of the results as rolled from the OSRIC tables.

>> Download Level 1/Zone F key.

>>Download the full-size map (so far).

Winners Announced for the Adventure Site Contest III

Ben Gibson over at Coldlight Press announced the winners of this year's Adventure Site Contest, and while my submission, Ophidian Temple, wasn't the top-prize winner, it did make it into the winners' bracket for inclusion in the anthology publication of the same name (due out sometime later this year).

I'm happy to have made the cut. OT was one of my first adventures written solely for a 1e/OSRIC campaign, rather than an adaptation of one of my earlier adventures for either D&D 5e or my homebrew version of Arcanum.

The winner of this year's contest is John Nash, who entered a cat-themed adventure, the Temple of Bast for BECMI/RC. He wrote one of my favorite adventures for last year's contest, Sausages of the Devil Swine, which made it into my top 5 picks during judges' scoring. John's a highly creative author, so I look forward to reading his submission.

While I'm obviously disappointed I didn't nab the top nod, I'm pretty proud of this one. It's deadly and has a fairly brutal time clock running that ramps the finale up to '11' if the party dicks around too long. Here's a link to download the adventure for yourself. Ben ran the temple recently for his table and said they had a fun time with it. Let me know how it runs for you.