My favorite quiet time activity in October through January.
Ahh, my favorite time of year. The weather gets cooler, leaves start to fall, and the bugs disappear. I sit down to work on creating a dungeon after the dinner is cleared off the table and the dishes are done.
Back in the day I would read modules to run when everyone got together on Saturday. I really like a lot of the old AEG and Goodman Games modules. A lot of them are easily incorporated into ongoing campaigns. Now that I’m older, I find it a lot easier just to homebrew something.
I find myself bitten with the dungeoneering bug once more. For the last week of November, I’m going to build a dungeon based on Johnn Four’s Five Room Dungeon. It can be found on his site here. I also highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter. Johnn has been around for a long time and his DM/GM advice has always been stellar.
How to get them in the door?
The biggest challenge with most dungeons is motivating the players to explore the thing. Unless there’s a specific in game quest or mission to find something or rescue someone from the baddie in the dungeon, I find it challenging to get adventures in the door. The short dungeons seem to be more challenging than mega dungeons when it comes to getting the group to explore thoroughly.
Here’s 1d12 random dungeon entrance hooks:
- Strange music emanates from deep within a seemingly abandoned ruin.
- One of the party steps off the trail to go to the bathroom and falls 30 feet into a hole.
- A barely noticeable path off the trail leads to a maze of brambles and thorns. The walls don’t burn and soon the characters discover traps and ambushes withing the maze along with loot from other hapless travelers that found their way into the maze.
- A dragon, wyvern, or some other large flying reptile lands on a standing stone in the distance.
- A passing traveler gives the group a map to a secret location rumored to contain fabulous treasures. The traveler’s adventuring days are over, but maybe the group can use the map.
- A goblin runs by with a stolen (MacGuffin.) He is being pursued by two bounty hunters who desire the treasure and know the location of the goblin’s lair.
- A map falls out of the book one of the characters was perusing in town.
- An object crashes to the ground near the characters revealing an unexplored underground cairn.
- Water from the primary well in the village has been diverted to a deep underground structure.
- The characters hear of an ancient village that fell. The ruins of the village’s lodge and a few other stone buildings still stand in a distant forest. Why the village fell or was destroyed remains a mystery.
- Three standing stones appear overnight on an island in the middle of a large nearby lake.
- One of the characters is foraging for food and notices a rabbit running into its hole in a set of stone ruins.
Please note that I abstained from my old favorite- A man clutching a map in his hand stumbles into the inn and falls dead on the characters’ table. The three arrows in his back tell the tale of a local goblin (kobold, bugbear, orc, lizard man, beast folk, etc) tribe. The map indicates treasure buried deep in their territory.
That first room always seems the most important.
Perhaps more important than the final encounter is the first room of any given dungeon environment. If it’s too complicated or challenging, the group might turn around and go home. If it seems too easy suspicion sets in that it could be too deadly (my players are paranoid) or it’s not enough challenge to warrant their time. That Goldilocks zone is where the characters have to risk life, limb, and pursuit of sweet, sweet loot enough to make them want to go in.
One of my go-to scenarios is one where a couple of unsuspecting farm kids accidentally move some rocks on their property and discover a buried temple, cairn, or gravesite. Inevitably this sets some awful flesh eating monster loose on the land. If it’s not farmers it’s woodcutters, miners, hunters, trappers, merchants on the road, or run-of-the-mill explorers. (Halfling scouts wearing pith helms if we’re not being totally serious.) It’s slightly more effective than a notice on the local bulletin board or the town crier announcing the missing people.
This is where it begins for the Chimney of Hell’s Furnace.
A Shadowdark Compatible Adventure for Levels 4-6.
In this case I’ve chosen a couple of local farm kids. Jake and Eddy were working hard on their father’s land, moving a huge boulder one sunny Monday afternoon. They successfully moved the boulder to discover it blocked a large rune-covered door.
The door is quite obviously locked and possibly swollen shut after years of being covered in mud. Of course, Jake and Eddy, not being ones to understand fancy writing or runes promptly ran to town to look for some of those wizened adventuring types to figure out what it means. After looking around for a while and putting the word out to the bar maids, innkeeper, stable boy, and a few others whom they know, the boys ran back to the site to continue excavating around the doorway.
The door apparently opens outward and seemingly goes straight for a short ways before forming a stone columnar shaft leading downward at a very sharp angle. The boys can only dig about so far before their father arrives on the scene and/or the adventurers show up. After a little excavation, the boys have uncovered a significant amount of shale, coal, and a sulfur. The ground around the door even seems a bit warm to the touch.
To be continued…
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Jeff's Game Box 