Ophidian Temple (2025 Adventure Site Contest Submission)

Taking a brief break from writing up level 6 of The Hurricane Dungeon to talk about this year's Adventure Site Contest hosted by Coldlight Press. I'm not judging this year (I may have "overstayed my welcome" with such long and in-depth breakdowns of each submission), but I am definitely entering. My submission for the first contest, Etta Capp's Cottage, won a spot in the final publication. Last year's entry, Owlbear Hill, was a bit too ambitious and failed to make the cut.

I just turned in my submission for the third annual contest, though I actually finished it back in August (the contest didn't open until November 1). I've titled this one Ophidian Temple (not great, but precise... I just couldn't land on a better title that didn't sound dumb or trite). It's written for AD&D and intended for 4–6 player characters of 5th to 7th level. The elevator pitch for the adventure reads:

Drums in the jungle herald the return of the snake-men to their evil temple.
Blood sacrifices to their demon-god begin anew.
Who will stand against their evil plans?

The site began as a sketch map I doodled in one of my notebooks many years ago (probably early-2000s). Over the summer, I pulled my box of old, hand-written/drawn game materials out of the attic and scanned everything in: Unfinished adventures, house rules ideas, character sheets and sketches, etc. Forty years worth (sheesh!). This map was in that lot. It's pretty simple and has no liner notes or indications of what it was intended to be. I doubt it was anything more than a random scribble while I was working on something else. It had a pleasing shape though, so I decided to put it to use after many years. I love it that an idea from the past has found a home in the future.

The original map had a few problems I needed to address to make it an adventure worthy of a Classic Adventure Gaming title. For one, it's pretty linear despite the side branches; not very suitable for CAG-style exploration. The layout also creates several bottlenecks for both player characters and enemies that had the potential to make dungeon combat a series of hallway fights between opposing sides of 2–3 combatants. That happens frequently in D&D, and smart players know how to use bottlenecks to funnel large numbers of opponents into a manageable front line, but I wanted to open this one up a bit.

The layout and details I drew suggested a tomb structure of some kind, nestled in the back of a canyon or maybe a deep cave. There's also a throne room, which isn't necessarily out of place. Tombs are a bit limited in terms of monster selection, though, mostly undead, vermin, constructs like living statues and such. As I thought about what I would want to say with yet another tomb dungeon, I came up blank. More accurately, I couldn't find anything interesting to do with it that I (and others) haven't done a million times.

In my Keep on the Badlands sandbox campaign, I had a whole adventure area populated by yuan-ti: A hidden valley filled with crumbling temples, dinosaurs, a giant ape, and terraced gardens subsumed into the rain forest. Unfortunately, my players never quite got to the yuan-ti area and their temple went largely undeveloped (the players gave up two-thirds of the way into the valley).

The idea of the yuan-ti temple stuck with me, though. Yes, it's still trope-y as hell, but I've never done much with this type of setting other than when I ran my version of Dwellers of the Forbidden City back in the 80s. This, despite my love of Tarzan novels, movies about jungle exploration and lost cities, and tales of dinosaurs and other monstrous versions of real-world creatures. A formative influence was watching Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings as a kid. The world-building in that show is incredible and would make for a banging campaign area.

 

With a yuan-ti temple in mind, I dropped the original map scan into Photoshop, added a grid, and then sketched out the contours of the dungeon, fixing some of the issues to make the site more interesting. I also dropped in a few notes about the dungeon contents.

 

This is almost identical to the final version I used.

As I started reading through the monster descriptions to sort out how I would place and use each encounter, I really fell out of love with the yuan-ti for this site. I never much liked them to begin with; they're not terrible, but they have a high degree of specificity and a fair amount of complexity, which is not something you want in an adventure site with a hard page limit. I planned on using the ophidians from Monster Manual II as minions of the yuan-ti, but then I realized they work perfectly fine as the primary antagonists.

I never paid ophidians much attention before now. My previous 20+ year campaign was firmly rooted in a classic, Northern European/Scandinavian-style fantasy setting, so snake-men were far from my typical antagonists. My 5e Badlands campaign was set in a Southwestern US/Meso-American-style desert region with adjacent jungles, which was perfect for using monsters I'd never really employed before. Even then, I overlooked the ophidians.

I think this has a lot to do with two things: One, the MMII is not very good. There are some standout creatures for sure (though the best of these were introduced in earlier modules), but most are either meh or borderline stupid, or just variations on another monster (the Fiend Folio is full of this as well). The second problem is the artwork. It's boring.

There are four artists listed: Jim Holloway, Harry Quinn, Dave Sutherland, and Larry Elmore (who did the awful cover). I honestly don't like Elmore's art style, and the way that ogrish-looking creature wields his halberd is completely backward. I attribute Elmore's art with the decline of AD&D (contemporaneously, not causally) and so it triggers a certain revulsion in me, perhaps unfairly. Same with Harry Quinn. His stuff is just ugly and uninspiring. I didn't care much for DCS's art back in the day, although I pored over every inch of his illustrations, but now I have a great deal of respect for his giant-sized contribution to the look of the game (and modern fantasy, for that matter). His work in the MMII is not his best, however.

Jim Holloway accounts for maybe half of the illustrations. I love his character stuff and he has a great eye for setting up a (usually comedic) scene that still looks like classic D&D, ridiculous situations that you could see happening to player characters. His creature designs, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. They're not bad, per se; just bland and static, lacking any of the dyamism or creativity in his character illustrations. Behold: The Ophidian. *Yawn.*

He looks like he just got out of bed. Yeah, it's a snake with arms, big deal. It's so dull, your eyes sort of wander over it and then move on. He should be coiled upright, weapon and shield raised, baring his fangs dripping with poison, setting his beady, soulless eyes on his prey. Instead, we get this and it sucks. I imagine these guys were rushed by the production deadline, underpaid (or not paid), and just DGAF because the company was falling apart around them. Still, what might have been otherwise remains a tantalizing dream.

In any case, the ophidian! It's not bad at all. They're natural minions with 3–4 hit dice, so in the same upper class as creatures like jackalweres, wererats, and ogres. They have natural armor the equivalent of mail, and can use weapons and shields to boost their combat numbers. Their bite attack isn't that great, but an extra 1–3 damage attack is nothing to dismiss, either. Their venom inflicts a lycanthropy-type disease that slowly turns the victim into an ophidian over the course of 2–3 weeks. (It was this mutability that gave me the idea for the big boss: A snake-ape hybrid demon.) The disease is easily curable though, so unless it goes untreated, it's not too big a long-term threat (and a non-existent one if the adventure is played only as a one-shot). Still, it's a neat idea that could spin into all sorts of complications for the party in a long-form campaign.

That's basically it: Snakes with weapons. Perfectly simple for what I want to do here. Moving on, when I think of jungles, I always think of giant ants, so they're in as well. D&D giant ants are no joke. I talk about this in another blog post for the Hurricane Dungeon. The 3 HD giant soldier ants have a poison sting that is poorly written in the Monster Manual and completely mistranslated in OSRIC, but even the 2 HD workers can be nasty in numbers. An unfortunate wandering encounter of just two worker ants chewed through a 1st- and 2nd-level party in my Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower campaign, resulting in a near-TPK.

I also wanted a plant monster of some kind that wasn't a yellow musk creeper or shambling mound (both of which are present in the Hurricane Dungeon levels). There are the weird flowers and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing from S3 in the MMII, but I remembered there being a couple of other plant creatures as well. While flipping through the book, I came across the mandragora (which I am committed to using somewhere as it's kinda neat) and the mantrap just below it, which turned out to be precisely what I wanted.

Using plant creatures in subterranean settings is always challenging for a designer without resorting to a hand-wavey magical solution. In this case, I created a collapse in the ceiling through which the jungle has entered the complex, allowing for an organic (and logical) scenario to unfold. Another recurring problem with plant monsters is their lack of mobility, making them easy targets for missile fire and spell casting, so I threw in a few giant boring beetles to make this encounter harder, tactically. Boring beetles are most certainly not boring, however; they are jaw-droppingly deadly with 5 HD, plate armor carapace, and a mandible attack that does frikkin 5–20 damage. One of these nearly demolished our party of 4th-to-6th-level characters in Prince's campaign.

They are also an anomaly. Of all the giant beetle species, they are the only ones that include any treasure type at all, and theirs is a doozy! A combined C, R, S, T on the treasure tables is comparable to a low-grade dragon's hoard, with mid-range chances for lots of gold, platinum, gems, jewelry, potions, and scrolls, and modest chances for copper, silver, and electrum coins and a couple of magic items to boot. Our group in Prince's campaign stumbled across a beetle in its lair and made out like bandits. The beetle's description doesn't say why this is, though it mentions a communal intelligence in some cases. My theory is that this is a misplaced treasure type, a publishing error that belongs somewhere else. The only creature with a similar type is the triton (C, R, S, T, X).

I picked two other monsters to reinforce the serpentine theme of the place. The necrophidius, or "death worm," is an interesting creature. It looks like a human skull with fangs on top of a skeletal snake's body, but it's not an undead; it's a golem-like construct created to serve as either assassins or guardians. I've used them on several occasions and, while they might not be that tough physically, they are quite deadly. They have a hypnotizing effect that renders victims who fail their save helpless. On top of that, their venomous bite paralyzes, which also renders victims helpless. It doesn't say this in the monster's text description, but I added a reminder in the adventure key that their bite against a helpless victim, according to the rules, would be equivalent to an assassination check on the assassin's table. This creature is perfectly capable of one-shot killing any of its victims. That's nasty.

The other choice was a couatl. I've always enjoyed putting little places within an adventure in which the party can get some sort of boost or helpful aid. I hid the couatl in a secret treasure vault and trapped it inside a "good" version of an iron flask. That seems like the sort of prisoner an evil snake-man cult would keep. If the party frees her, she can cast some healing/recovery spells for them. I left open the possibility that a Lawful Good character could persuade her to help their fight, but they would have to be of the Lawfully-goodest type and their current situation would need to be dire for me (the couatl) to intervene like that.

Finally, I created the main antagonists: A snake-man priestess, who is mostly just a human cleric with snake-like features including scaly skin (natural AC) and poison fangs, and the snake-ape demon "god" who isn't present unless the party dicks around and allows the priestess to complete her summoning ritual.

Speaking of that, I included several environmental effects in the temple as well. One of these is the ever-present sound of frantic drumming and droning chants by the cultists as they work to bring forth their demonic master. While the party is present, the pace and intensity of the drumming/chanting increases, signalling to the PCs that they better get a move on. The players won't know it exactly, but they have 24 turns (4 hours) to put an end to this or the snake-ape demon arrives in the main temple and will add to the difficulty of the final fight.

Another effect is that the temple is filled with clouds of herbal incense being burned in copious amounts in the summoning areas. It smells unpleasant but isn't harmful in the outer areas. As the party gets closer to the central chamber, however, the smoke's narcotic effects can overcome them after just ten minutes. This will require the party to either figure out a way to remove the smoke, or beat down the cultists in less than 10 rounds. Otherwise, poison saves to avoid falling unconscious are on the menu. Anyone who stays unconscious in the smoke will eventually die of an overdose. The smoke stimulates the snake-men but is not toxic to them.

A third effect is the pollen of the mantrap plant. It is so fragrant and pleasing that it nullifies the smell of incense in the chamber, and has a hypnotizing effect as well. Victims who fail their saves are compelled to approach the main plant, which then envelops and digests them in its leafy fronds. Lovely.

I placed several traps also: A spear trap in a central hallway and paralyzing darts from the walls in another chamber. Both traps are triggered by stepping on certain floor tiles, and the snake-men know which ones to avoid. The third trap is in the necrophidius' lair, and its a simple tripwire that closes and locks the entrance door, to split the party and allow the necrophidius to more easily kill its isolated prey.

I don't recall how I selected the treasure. After so many random stocking rolls made for the Hurricane Dungeon, it all kind of blends together. I'm certain I chose the Staff of the Python to reinforce the snake theme, and maybe gave the priestess the Cloak of Protection, but the others feel randomly rolled. Who knows? I was very generous with the money, however, though much of it is hidden and/or tricky to obtain.

Players who defeat all the monsters and find all the treasure can expect to net about 175–250,000 xp, depending on how much magic treasure they keep or sell. This is around 35–50k each for a party of 5 PCs, which is enough to go from 4th to 5th level, or 5th to 6th level, and a fair chunk of the way from 6th to 7th.

You can download the PDF here.

The Hurricane Dungeon – The Chambers of Woe (Level 5)

Continuing my series on creating this megadungeon, this is the seventh map I drew during the power outage, which became Level 5. Again, this is because I wanted to keep the "finished" levels and the cavern levels together (with the caves being the lowest levels). The original map feels a little uninspired compared to the others, though it is probably a more "classic" dungeon layout.

There are a few interesting features on closer look. Large rooms and long corridors, lots of loopey-doopiness, many secret doors and passageways, false doors marked with a 'T' for "traps," and hey, look at that...stairs to the levels above and below! It's not too bad, actually. The central, cross-shaped feature, includes directional arrows and four movement options. That's cool. (I was certain I cribbed this idea from somewhere, and sure enough, a similar feature is in the OD&D Sample Dungeon.) So, I felt pretty good about what I had to work with as I started fleshing out this level, even if it's a little Plain Jane.

I had already connected the staircase up to Level 4, and I lined up the stairs down to an area on the map I was using for Level 6. That map for Level 6 also contained a staircase up in a different location, so I had to figure out that connection as well. The stocking rolls for Level 4 had also indicated two stairs, a pit shaft, and a trap door and ladder leading to this level, but I had already placed those by the time I began work on Level 5. Finally, my stocking rolls for Level 5 included an additional two staircases and a chimney exiting down from here. Once I added those access routes, along with the room key numbers, a title, and shading, the level looks like this:

 My content stocking rolls (for a 35-room dungeon level) came up with the following results:

–Empty: 11 (31% / 35%)
–Monster: 4 (11.5% / 20%)
–Monster + Treasure: 11 (31% / 25%)
–Stairs: 3 (9% / 5%)
–Trick/Trap: 5 (14% / 5%)
–Treasure: 1 (3% / 5%)

The first % number is the percentage of the actual content rolls; the second % number is the typical expected percentage spread (per OSRIC guidelines).

Rotting Effects in D&D

As I re-acquaint myself with the rules of Basic/Advanced D&D, I'm remembering some of the odd bits and pieces of the game that we had to figure out for ourselves back in the day. One of these bits is the effect of "rotting" as a result of a select few monsters found in the game, most notably the mummy and the violet fungus.

5e uses a system of damage types to reconcile many of these incongruities from earlier editions, so for these monsters (and others like them), the game applies a set amount of damage and classifies it as "necrotic." In the case of mummies, the victim continues losing hit points from necrotic damage over time and can't heal until a Remove Curse spell is applied, whereas violet fungi get 1d4 attacks that do straight necrotic damage (up to 4d8 in a single round, which is nasty but not that dangerous to mid-level and higher characters), with no other lingering effect. It's a simple system that makes clear exactly what happens to the victim (one of the things 5e tends to do pretty well), but doesn't carry the same degree of threat as their AD&D counterparts.

For the AD&D versions, both creatures' rotting effects are extremely deadly at any level, but the actual physical results are not entirely clear. I started running a campaign for my tabletop group using a hybrid of the "Advanced" versions of Old School Essentials and Labyrinth Lord rulesets, but I lean heavily on AD&D to help with some of the behind-the-scenes granularity, and to adapt some of the monsters and magic items that aren't in OSE or LL.

"Why not just run AD&D?" you may ask. Ease of entry, mostly. The girls have only ever played 5e and were getting overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of the game as they leveled up, so I wanted to give them an easier set of rules to manage that still provides a fair range of flavor to play with. I also need to re-acclimate myself to the "old ways" of running the game, so it seemed like a good way to go. My plan is to ease them into AD&D as they get more familiar with how the older system works.

In any case, I dropped a single violet fungus into the dungeon I'm running, but as I read the Monster Manual entry, I found it to be fairly vague on what happens when the fungus touches someone. They get 4 attacks as a 3HD monster, and if one of their branches makes contact with a target: 

The excretion from these branches rots flesh in but one melee round unless a saving throw versus poison is made or a cure disease is used.

This immediately brings up several questions in my mind:

1. No damage is listed, so what effect does "...rots flesh..." have?

2. Does it matter where you are hit? AD&D doesn't have a hit location rule, so do we make one up or does the rot simply kill you outright?

3. Obviously, if you fail the saving throw vs. Poison (also categorized as a save vs. Death), you have one round to apply a Cure Disease or the rot takes effect, but why is it not Neutralize Poison instead to match the save category (as far as I know, avoiding disease does not involve a saving throw)?

4. It's not an issue in OSE/LL, but in AD&D, Cure Disease has a casting time of 1 turn (10 rounds). Does this mean you need to start applying it within one round (minute), but you then need 9 more rounds of uninterrupted casting to avoid the rotting effect? Neutralize Poison has a casting time of 7 segments, which seems more usable under these circumstances, but you would still need to cast it within 3 segments of the victim being touched or, presumably, the rot would kill the victim before the spell was complete (unless, again, you simply need to start casting it within 1 round to prevent the effect).
   

The online consensus seems to be that if a violet fungus hits you, then you will die in one round if you fail the save and have no Cure Disease spell available. That's pretty rough, especially since the text does not say explicitly that the victim dies. 

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 9 (#Dungeon23)

As I feared, the most difficult part of the #Dungeon23 project (for me) isn't writing a room every day, it's posting the work on a timely basis. 

Between spring landscaping projects, freelance writing projects, and running two D&D campaigns (one weekly campaign online and one bi-weekly campaign irl), most of my free time is spent creating the D23 content. The content is done, I just haven't had much extra time to post it to the blog.

This posting (for week #9) still puts me a full week (#10) behind, which becomes two weeks if I don't post again by this weekend (the current week is #11). My goal is to finish this week's rooms, take pictures of my completed pages, transcribe the pages into a doc, and then post the last two weeks by this weekend (or early next week). That will completely catch me up. I predict falling behind again, though.

I'm fairly pleased with the development of the dungeon so far (one-fifth of the total). It's holding my daily creative interest, and I've sketched out the entire thing in broad strokes, so that's a great sign for being able to complete it.

I was trying to create Tunnels Beneath the Earth completely from scratch (stealing just a few unused ideas from old notebooks which seemed to fit the theme), but elements from my Deep Vaults megadungeon concept began bleeding heavily into TuBE. I finally came to terms with the fact that I will likely never get around to finishing DV, so I may as well just merge the two concepts together.

It's not a wholesale union; the factions are all different, for example, and TuBE's scale utterly dwarfs DV's, but I'm stealing many of the sci-fantasy elements I liked from DV (particularly the crystals and some of the weird technology). I introduced a bit of that material in Level 3 (starting this week), and I started calling the "impervious blue metal" by its new, super-obvious name: impervium.

I have some regrets about how I structured the dungeon at the beginning. I wasn't thinking about the calendar dates; I was looking at the project as 7 rooms per section, with 52 sections total over 12 levels. I did not take into account that each month doesn't have 28 days (only one does, in fact...who knew??).  I don't want to just switch over to the calendar-less format because I like the conceit of having a monthly level theme.

This isn't that big a deal, structurally, but it means most of the weekly blog postings will cover pieces of two different sections, instead of one clean section at a time. Then at the end of the month, I have to add 2-3 "bonus" rooms to close out the calendar month/dungeon level.

If I could do it over, I would key my rooms to the calendar date. I think a lot of people did it that way, but I am dumb and took a weird approach to the structure. I may try to fix that situation here shortly.

On to Week 9. Fingers crossed I can get everything else posted by the weekend...

__________

"The Upper Caves"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 4, Cont. (02/22 – 02/28)

Scale: Each square = 20x20 ft.

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 7 (#Dungeon23)

"The Lower Caves"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 2, Cont. (02/08 – 02/14)

Scale: Each square = 20x20 ft.

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 6 (#Dungeon23)

"The Waterworks"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 1, Cont. (2/1 – 2/7)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 5 (#Dungeon23)

"Bonus Rooms (The Crypts)"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Addition to Section 4 (1/29 – 1/31)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 3 (#Dungeon23)

"The Storerooms"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Section 3 (1/15 – 1/21)

Classic Monsters Revisited: The Shade (MMII)

The Shade first appeared in the AD&D Monster Manual II. It's a curious entry as it's more of a template than an individual creature. The shade is supposed to be built on the chassis of a leveled NPC by simply adding abilities and features to the existing numbers. For extra complexity, the shade's abilities and features vary according to light conditions.

There's a lot of moving parts to this monster. After figuring out the shade's original statistics in life, the DM then has to consult two separate tables in the monster's description to calculate its current scores and powers, which can be altered mid-battle as light conditions change. 

Typical of late-1e and 2e materials, the shade's description suffers from a "wall-of-text" that hides an interesting monster concept behind a lot of superfluous, often-contradictory detail. I'm using this monster in Moormist Manor, but I want to break the original shade down to its core components and then rebuild it into a more-interesting monster for AD&D (plus a 5e version because I haven't decided which ruleset I'm using yet).