Adventure Site Contest II – Deadline for Submissions is One Month Away

With a month left to go, I turned in my submission for Coldlight Press' second annual Adventure Site Contest. I've titled it Owlbear Hill and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, thematically.

I've estimated it as appropriate for a party of 4–7 characters from 5th to 7th level. I was hoping to get it playtested before turning it in, but corralling a group of family men in their 40s to 60s is challenging in the best of times, much less over the winter holidays. I ran some solo fights using pre-gens and they were sufficiently tough without being easy TPKs. Much will depend on the characters' levels and capabilities (though that is always the case). 

If I've designed it accurately, a party of all 5th level PCs is going to have a hard time, while a party of all 7th levels is likely to come out on top without serious risk unless someone screws up. There's almost 95,000 xp in monsters and treasure (and much more if the players sell the magic items). For a party of five adventurers, that's about 19,000 xp each—enough to take a 5th level fighter to 6th, or a little more than halfway from 6th to 7th. Getting all of it is another story, but even if they only collect one-third, it's still 6-7k; not a bad haul.

Like Etta Capp's Cottage—my submission for last year's contest—this one started out as a simple adaptation of a previously-created monster lair. I have a folder filled with dozens of these things I've written over the years. In this case, it was an owlbear lair I first built for my Cold March campaign (my campaign world's "Viking region"). The original was designed between game sessions as an adventure site for 5e, after the party encountered some owlbears during one of their overland journeys and decided to track them back to their den. I later repurposed the site as a "lurid lair" in my 5e Gloomy Forest campaign (from which Etta Capp's Cottage also emerged).

The lair was a bit rough around the edges because I only had a short time to put it together, but I liked some of what I came up with, particularly the idea of using owlbear feathers as "treasure" and the hidden tomb with a doomed party of adventurers who died while trying to plunder it. As I began to convert it to AD&D, however, it seemed too "basic" for a contest in which some really talented designers are participating. It lacked punch and wow... fine for a quick session with my regular players, but unsatisfying for a global audience of discerning DMs.

I'd already decided to expand on the lair, but tacking on a whole tomb seemed the obvious and boring route. I wanted something different. While reading the owlbear's description in the Monster Manual, I took note of the opening sentence: "The horrible owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard."

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this idea, but suddenly I had my adventure site's elevator-pitch: This will be the lair/laboratory of a crazed magic-user who is producing an army of owlbears to unleash on the nearby town. As I continued flipping through the MM, however, I noticed how many other creatures are either known or said to have been created by some variation of "insane wizard's experimentation." This continued into the Fiend Folio, with lots of other ideas from the Monster Manual 2 as well. The adventure site spun out from there.

One of the fun things about contests like this are the submission guidelines establishing a hard page count and reader usability standards. They force you to boil everything down to its essence, trim off the fat, and parse your copy down to fit as much evocative content as possible within the limited space and layout restrictions. Some people keep it light and simple, with plenty of white space in the manuscript...all perfectly fine and admirable. I'm kind of the opposite...I try to include as much copy as I possibly can, clawing for every scrap of page space within the limits.

And though I'm obsessive about my own map-making, there is no creative pressure to create a work of art. The charm of a hand-drawn map takes me back to the early 80s when buying a pad of blank graph paper released a flood of imagination and adventure. Making maps was what really hooked me on D&D, and I figure out so much about the dungeon and what's going on within it by simply sketching, drawing, then fine-tuning the map. For me, it's as much a part of the content creation process as the writing of it.

On the flip side of the creation process, it can be frustrating to have to slice off chunks you really like due to the space constraints. In the original version of Etta Capp's Cottage, for example, there's an underlying story concerning her origin, the identities of the bodies in her lair, and the existence of a mysterious suitor who sends her gifts. Losing all of that was tough, but the condensed version still keeps much of the mystery while being vague enough (by necessity) that any DM can now put their own stamp on it.

With Owlbear Hill, I had a whole "slime lab" section in which the insane magic-user was crossbreeding various oozes and jellies with a gelatinous cube "starter," pumping out miniature transparent cubes with different slime effects, but I had to lose it. A couple pieces of the slime lab remain in the final version, and I'll repurpose the rest for something else. (Maybe do a sequel for ASC III??)

Once the reviews and voting are done (probably sometime in February/March), I'll publish the full details of the adventure site in a future post, whether it gets chosen for the final publication or not. As a preview, here's the introduction and site map.

"There’s a spot back in the woods they call Ol’ Bare Hill. Used to be a Chaos temple on top way back when, but then the Law came and knocked it down. We don’t go there…ever. These troubles that are going on…it’s that hill, I’m telling you."

I'm also a judge in this year's contest, though I'm a little nervous about my review/critique skills. Still, I've read, written, and run hundreds of adventures over the years, so I have some experience to bring to the table. Looking forward to the challenge.

EDIT: I participated in an episode about the contest over on the Classic Adventure Gaming podcast.

Adventure Site Contest

Ben Gibson over at Coldlight Press hosted an adventure contest for short, 2-page scenarios, so I entered a 1e/OSRIC version of an ettercap lair, titled: Etta Capp's Cottage. 

I posted my 5e version of this "lurid lair" a few years ago, but reworked it to not only convert the adventure to a different system, but also to trim out and adapt the writeup to fit the contest guidelines (and fix a few map details). The contest version isn't dramatically different than the original, but I had to lose some of the details (most of which were either campaign-specific or backstory bits that weren't essential to running the scenario).

With judging complete, I didn't win the contest, but my adventure was selected for inclusion in a for-free publication on itch.io in the future. Congratulations to the contest winners, and thanks, Ben, for hosting the contest...it's always fun to share my work with others and get feedback to improve my dungeon design.

Here is Ben's review of the adventure, along with reviews from contest judges EOTB and Owen Edwards YT channel (review starts at 16:52).

When I first posted the 5e version, my players had avoided the encounter initially, but they returned to it a few sessions later and vanquished the ettercap-matron. I also included the encounter in my Badlands campaign (modified to fit the desert-canyon locale) for a different group of players, and ran a hastily-converted version for an OSRIC one-shot. The two versions are very different, gameplay-wise, but the creepiness of the adventure setting really worked on all the players.

Here is the 1e/OSRIC version I submitted if anyone wants to download a copy, but I encourage everyone to pick up the Adventure Sites publication from Coldlight Press once it's released. It sounds like there were some great entries and I can't wait to get a look for myself.

Keep on the Badlands – The Dead Pines

I seeded my original map for the campaign sandbox with a series of "Lurid Lairs" (a la Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy)—one-or two-sentence descriptions of a potential encounter/adventure area that could be ad-libbed easily should the players wander into it. One of these was the following site, nestled in a box canyon well within walking distance of the keep:

Dozens of rock cairns spawn the ancient skeletons of slain warriors that rise from the dead to attack. One has a +1 weapon.

On one of the party's initial forays into the Badlands, I rolled some encounter checks for their trek and came up with two results: Discovery > Trail and Monster > Undead > 1d3+1 Skeletons. The first encounter occurred just a few miles down the southern canyon, so it seemed a perfect opportunity to cram the two encounters together and introduce the lurid lair.

Adapting the Borderlands

After purchasing arms and equipment with their shares from the escort job, the party heads out the Keep gate under the watchful eye of the guards on the wall. Though it was only mid-morning, the heat was already unbearable. Returning to the spot along the north road where the other caravan was ambushed, the party discovers that Keep soldiers have already recovered the bodies of the slain merchant and his laborers. The charred skeleton of the wagon still sits off to the side of the path as vultures pick over the carcasses of the dead draft horses. 

No sign of the bodies of the goblin bandits is found, but after locating the gangs' tracks, the party follows their trail westward, off the caravan path and into the rugged wilderness. The ground becomes loose and uneven. Ledges, gullies, and cul-de-sacs make moving in a straight line all but impossible. Fortunately, the ranger's guidance helps the party make decent progress despite the treacherous terrain, and soon they enter a wide pass between a cluster of jagged hillocks to the north and an imposing ridgeline to the south. 

The southern ridges rise like the walls of an impenetrable fortress. Their serrated cliffs conceal numerous shadowy clefts and dark folds, and as the party moves through the pass, they sense eyes watching them. A tense hour later, they emerge from the pass into a stretch of broken ground that slopes gently west and then disappears into the golden savanna of the Horse Plains stretching out before them.

The tracks turn south along this fractured border, skirting the edge of the Badlands and leading the party farther away from the Keep. They have already consumed much of their water, and still have to get back to the Keep before nightfall or be forced to sleep outside without proper camping gear. Just as the party decides to turn back, however, the air fills suddenly with the angry buzz of goblin arrows... 

__________

I love wilderness areas. 

The characters in my campaigns must travel in-game to wherever they want to go, with all that such journeys entail. I always design an exterior component to my adventures, and the party typically has to find the dungeon before they can start exploring it. My players don't often like or appreciate this aspect of my campaigns, but I don't care; I do it for me. I owe this minor obsession to B2 ( and T1 and X1 to lesser extents).

The B2 wilderness area isn't even all that conducive for exploration and adventure. Any of the encounters can easily trash a group of 1st-levels. Most of the encounters are gated by an imposing river, whereas an easy-to-follow trail takes characters right up to the dungeon (the main event). The dungeon itself is so close to the Keep, it defies logic that the Castellan wouldn't immediately send his troops to wipe out the evil camp forming right on his doorstep.

But even with these gentle flaws, B2's concept of a dungeon existing within a wilderness teeming with encounters is ur-D&D for me. I don't consider a dungeon "complete" until I know something about the territory around it (and what lives there). 

When I set out to adapt B2, I knew I wanted to greatly expand the wilderness area but still use as much of the source material as I could. To prepare, I read through the original text carefully to pull out all the fun little details that Gary hides in his module-writing—details that are easy to miss if you just skim the write-up. As expected, I found quite a few things I did not remember.

Lurid Lairs: Owlbear Den

While the Gloomy Forest is a dense, old-growth woodland, it also lies in the highlands of Brackleborn province. The underlying terrain consists of steep-sided hills, with deep valleys running between them. Climbing the hills involves rigorous activity that eats up valuable daylight, meaning the party has tended to follow the maze of gullies, culverts, and channels that characterize the forest at ground level. They haven't quite realized how many areas and encounters are up on the hillsides that they've simply wandered beneath without ever realizing it.

Some of these encounter areas are lairs, the denizens of which populate the wandering encounter tables. If the players can locate a lair and wipe it out, then that creature type might disappear entirely from the tables. While a lair persists, it also generates an additional encounter check if the party wanders within a certain distance of it. Thus, wiping out a lair of monsters can have long-reaching exploration benefits.

I've sprinkled lots of these encounter lairs across the Gloomy Forest map: peryton nests; an awakened grove full of intelligent animals, plants, and myconids; a bullywug village; an ancient cemetery; an ettercap nest; etc. 

One such lair is the following owlbear den, a bit of content I cribbed from my old Frozen North campaign. With a few minor flavor changes from a Viking-style setting to a European/fey one, the content works just as well here. Reusing adventures is something I'd always avoided in the past...no idea why. It saves so much time and effort, and let's me revisit the adventure with a fresh perspective. With the right changes, I've even reused adventures for the original players and they didn't catch on.

As with most monsters in the 5e Monster Manual (particularly the classic monsters), I've had to de-neuter their archetypal special attacks. I don't know why 5e took away some of the core monster abilities (like the owlbear’s classic hug attack, or the rust monster’s ability to eat magic weapons and armor...it just makes no sense). I digress; my owlbears will hug the crap out of you. Changes to the core monster are described below.

Owlbear Den

This is the lair of a sleuth of owlbears—(8) “sows,” (6) juveniles, and a massive “boar.”

Lurid Lairs: Ettercap Cottage

In my regular Thursday night game, the players are exploring the Gloomy Forest—a hexcrawl sandbox with established encounter areas related to (3) factions: 1) Human bandits seeking to overthrow the local lord (whom they view as a usurper); 2) A green hag named Mamawaldi and her servant, a wight-lord known as "The Blackheart" (the undead form of an ancient warlord who once ruled this area); and 3) Ancient denizens of this forest, some of whom have fallen under Mamawaldi's wicked influence (if not her direct control).

At this point in the campaign, the player-characters have allied themselves with the local lord and largely neutralized the bandit threat. Now, they're searching a section of the forest looking for the last remnants of the surviving bandits and their leader. Although my players are relative novices to RPGs, they've quickly adopted some smart strategies in their exploration, including never entering the forest from the same direction twice in a row. As such, their map is now crisscrossed with paths and marked with notes. They're beginning to get a feel for the lay-of-the-land and discovering lots of the little details I've sprinkled across the forest (which is relatively contained at a mere 8 x 12 miles).

They found themselves following an old trail through an unexplored area after discovering an ancient stone marker that indicated the trail led to an elven shrine. As they went deeper, they began to notice the tops of the trees were draped with webs that became denser the farther down the trail they ventured (making the forest even gloomier). Undeterred, however, they came to a fork in the road where I had placed an encounter area that read, simply:

"A cozy cottage made of webbing hangs up in the trees here. It is the lair of an ettercap-matron named Etta Capp. She likes to spin spidersilk while she looks out the window overlooking the path. Her body can't be seen, but at the window she appears to be an old crone with a tiny wrinkled face and really long, silken silver hair. If she sees an elf, she mentions the shrine and directs the party down the east fork (where her children--(2) giant spiders and (2) spider swarms--will ambush the PCs). She steers them away from the west fork (to the shrine), warning them of a "dangerous forest spirit" down that path."

In case the PCs decided to attack her, I statted Etta out and gave her some minor "Legendary" powers, including the occasional ability to summon a spider swarm, a giant spider, or an ettercap to her defense.

The encounter went down pretty much as written. The girls were wary of Etta but engaged her in conversation and received her directions. They did not guess her true nature (or catch on to the pun in her name, even though Rachel shouted "Attercop, Attercop!" when I first mentioned the webs), and so followed the east path where they encountered the spider ambush. At the end of that session, the group seemed determined to return to the cottage and deal with Etta.

Over the intervening week, I had some thoughts about expanding the encounter a little bit and after some sketching and note-jotting, I felt I had a really good mini-dungeon on my hands. I drew out the map in better detail/quality—an unnecessary step since I redraw everything on the battlemat, but one which helps me refine the layout and figure out the various ways I can challenge the players. I then created a simple key for the interiors and added some notes about how the denizens of the expanded lair would react to the party's intrusion.

The next session, however, the party decided not to seek revenge and avoided her cottage on their return trip toward the shrine. To my chagrin, quite a few hours of hurried work between sessions vanished in the party's rear-view mirror. I'm saving it in the hopes they come back this way, but I was a little disappointed. It's certainly not the first time that's happened to me in my 40 years of DMing and it won't be the last. 

I have dozens of such lairs and micro-dungeons in my folders and I do eventually get to use them (or pieces of them), but I really like this one so I'll share it here. I've always called these micro-dungeons "Lurid Lairs" (after the set of tables in Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, which I was enthralled by in my youth.) This blog might be a good spot to post all that content for anyone to use. I designed this for 5e, since that's the version we're playing, but I think it's easily adapted to any edition or OSR ruleset.

Etta Capp's Cottage

Three trees stand close together here at the forest’s edge, overlooking a fork in the path. Their leafy boughs are thick with spiderwebs. Suspended from the branches is a delicate, 3-story cottage with shingled roofs, shuttered windows, flowerboxes, cornices, etc.--all made entirely of webbing. The area at the base of the trees is also shrouded in heavy webs, except for a cave-like opening between two of the trunks.