Works in Progress

I'm currently working on a couple of projects. I'm in the final review/fine-tuning phase of my next adventure for publication. It's an adventure I wrote probably 20 years ago. It was before I returned to D&D with the 5e playtest because the original manuscript was designed for my homebrew ruleset (built upon Bard Games' super-fun Arcanum series).

The adventure is set in the burnt-out ruins of a holy chapel in which the past fire hid a terrible secret about the goings-on there. The location was in my long-running King's Realm campaign, which was a Northern European/Arthurian setting, so the site's layout is very much based on a Christian chapel. This campaign wasn't explicitly "real-world" so the religion wasn't a Christian one, but it was monotheistic and similar to the CoE's organization, the king asserted Divine Right, etc. The "modern" religion of the Realm was also predated by a pagan religion that worshiped nature (and regarded the fey and elvenkind as holy). I poured two decades of creative energy into this world, so it had a lot of flavor and internal logic.

That was the first difficulty of converting this adventure into a publishable form. The events surrounding the chapel adventure were part of an ongoing thread that made total sense in the context of the whole campaign, but was meaningless padding without the context. I want my published adventures to be as modular as possible to give the DM maximum flexibility in inserting it into their campaign, so I had to strip out a lot of the adventure's background material and boil the "story" down to its core elements (the latter part wasn't actually that difficult). With the details toned down, I think many of the semi-Christian analogues to the adventure's flavor can be adapted easily to the DM's world.

In adapting the adventure to OSRIC, I've had to convert some of the mechanical elements to fit the system, but also expanded the material slightly. It's now a tight little adventure site with a pretty simple "plot" and a tidy resolution. It's a perfect side-quest or "on-the-road" adventure for cleric and paladins, but I did have to create some new hooks to make it palatable for more mercenary-type parties.

The manuscript is done but being edited, I'm finishing the fine details of the updated maps, and I still need to do a cover illustration, but my goal is to have the adventure done and published by the end of April. It's currently titled "The Haunted Chapel" which was all I needed for my own campaign purposes, but I'm thinking it might need a more evocative title to draw some attention. Then again, the simplicity lends itself to the modular design and I don't want to step on the DM's ability to adapt the adventure. It is after all, in fact, a haunted chapel.

My second project is partly for fun, partly for a future potential campaign. I discussed a bit of inspiration in a previous post, surrounding an idea to consolidate lots of my old kilo- and mega-dungeon material into a single creative concept. I'm calling it "Below Gwarnath" and its shaping up to be fun project.

Initially intended as an OSRIC demo for one of my legacy 5e players, I used the random dungeon generation tables in OSRIC to develop a sample dungeon map for my friend to bang around in and test drive the system. I first drew the map in Roll20 and was surprisingly pleased with the results so I then converted it into my house style in Photoshop (and added a few routes off the map, with the intention of expanding it). And expand it I have.

The original map in Roll20 was on their default 25x25 grid, but my standard Photoshop grids are 24x24 (6"x6" with 4 squares per inch), so I adjusted the R20 version to the new size, resulting in the following map:

Then I blew out the canvas size to 96x96 squares (24"x24"), which is divided into 16 "zones" of 24x24 squares, the size of the existing "original" map. Labeling each zone with a letter (A–P), I placed the existing map in zone F, to allow expansion in all four directions, and then just kept using the tables to generate the dungeon. This is what the new map looks like:

(Though this is a lo-res image; THIS is a higher-res version for more clarity.)

I'm now working out zones A and B, but haven't yet decided if I want to allow the layout to continue carrying over off this map, or if I want to use the canvas edge as a hard border. I've had a great time working on this. It's just a fun activity while watching TV or listening to music. I know I tinkered with the tables in the DMG back in the day, but I don't remember ever using them for any purpose (though I do remember being often confounded by how the procedures worked). Some of it stuck with me, because I began developing my own set of procedures back in college (and still have the half-formed notes), but just never worked it into anything I would ever use at the table.

Doing this exercise, I realized a big part of it is letting go of one's own inclinations about dungeon layout and design. It is hard to resist the tendency to want to bend the dice results into a direction I'd prefer them to go. In fairness, I think that was the intent of these procedures, to provide a springboard to your own designs, but I'm enjoying the challenge of adhering as closely to the rolls as possible. Sometimes, you have to fudge the layout results to fit an existing area, but the amount of serendipity I've experienced with the rolls has been fascinating. I was also never much of a fan of the "shoji screen"-style of dungeon design, with rooms and passages separated by a single-line wall, but the aesthetic has grown on me over the years.

I've also been populating the room contents as I go, which is a different approach than I used when stocking the Hurricane Dungeon. In that case, I took the number of rooms and rolled once on the contents table for each. Then I placed each result in the map location I wanted it to go, so as to cluster similar monsters in the same general area and place cool treasures in interesting locations. Here, I'm simply going with the rolls. That's resulted in some cool looking or secret rooms being empty, but for the most part I'm okay with how it's turned out.

The room content codes are included on the maps above: 'e' = empty, of course; 'm' = monster only; "m+t" = monster plus treasure; 't/t' = trick/trap; 'tr' = treasure only; st = stairs (or other inter-level connection). So far, I've written out a full key for zone F, and have rolled out specific details for the room contents in zones G, J, and K. Again, I've been using just the OSRIC tables for these rolls and, while these are functional, they are limited in scale. I'm concerned about repetitiveness across a large megadungeon space, and I'm planning for the Below Gwarnath campaign to use a wide swath of monsters from the AD&D era, with particular interest in lesser-utilized monsters. 

For that reason, I'm considering expanding the encounter tables to incorporate not only the OSRIC tables, but also the tables from the DMG, Fiend Folio, and Monster Manual II, as well as other monster selections from old Dragon and White Dwarf magazines, and Chaosium's All the World's Monsters. This will require a fuller, customized set of procedures. I'm not certain I have it in me to take on that project, however, so for now, I'm using the OSRIC tables as they are. Level 1 will be a fairly "normal"-seeming dungeon, with the weirdness factor and technology elements coming more into play the deeper the players get.

I'll continue posting the progress as I develop the map further.