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.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 3: The Sea Caves

In Part 1, I reconfigured the Manor House from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In Part 2, I adapted the Sample Dungeon from Holmes Basic. Next, I took the excised map sections from both and created a Sea Caves level. Part of this level (the explored part) serves as the pirate base. Another dungeon level—derived from Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves—exists between the Dungeon level and the Sea Caves, and I incorporated several areas from that into the Sea Caves level as well. I'll cover the full FSC level in an upcoming post.

By this point in the campaign, I had a pretty solid sketch map of the bluff's macro-area, showing the exterior orientations/positions of the house, the tower, the gardens and estate wall, and the not-so-obvious areas such as the sea cave entrances and a "muddy mound" in the salt swamp below the bluff. 

More importantly, by the time I got to mapping out the Sea Caves level, I had already shared the sketch map with the players, who did a really good job scouting out the whole area before delving too deep. This locked in the positions of certain sea cave entrances that had to connect with the finished Dungeon level map.

To start with, I took the bluff coastline from my sketch map and aligned it to the 4:1" grid on a blank Photoshop canvas (24" x 24", 7200 x 7200px). Then I took the sea cave segments I carved out of U1, the Sample Dungeon, and FSC, and aligned their grids to my map grid. I then reoriented and repositioned the segments to fit the bluff layout. 

I wanted the U1 sea caves to point west, to match the repositioned west wing of the manor from which the pirates signal their ship and guide the longboats into shore. I also increased the map scale for the U1 piece from the original 5' per square to 10', same as with the manor maps, to open the spaces up a bit. Green arrows indicate where the original sea caves will connect with the sea.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 2: The Dungeon Level

In Part 1, I rearranged the old manor house from U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to serve as the anchor point for the rest of the other adventure maps. Next, I took the original map from the Sample Dungeon in Holmes basic and sized it to the same 4:1" grid I used for the manor map. The grid in the Sample Dungeon map is hand-drawn and inaccurate, so I aligned the central vault (area A) to the accurate grid and adjusted all the passages and rooms that branch out from it. Then I placed an overlay of the manor outline over area A.

Original Sample Dungeon Map with Manor Overlay (scale = 10')

To fit the geographic location in my campaign world chosen for this site, the Sea Caves need to face south instead of west. To make that change and keep the basic flow of the dungeon, I also need to reposition rooms H, I, K, L, and M, as well as the connection from room J.