Hungerling lake

A small dungeon in the Underdark for low-level characters using a Dyson Logos map. The big challenge here is not alerting the horde of hungry carnivores that some edible adventurers have entered their dungeon.You can download it from here. It's my entry for the Itch.io Dyson Logos Jam, which is all about grabbing one of Dyson's free commercial maps and stocking it with creatures and treasures.

How does Dyson keep pumping out top-tier dungeon maps every couple of days? He's some kind of prodigy. The Bruce Lee of map-making.

Speaking of Itch.io, I've made copies of anything from my blog that looks useful on an Itch page of my own. Download 'em, print 'em, scatter them on the floor and roll around in 'em. No charge.

Browsing the RPG authors on Itch, it seems like everyone's got a game or several, but there's considerably less in terms of adventures and add-on material. Maybe that's a useful area to focus.

Void adventure

This is a half-baked idea for a zero-prep procedurally generated adventure, but I think it might have some legs to it.

First, the characters successfully navigate a suspiciously short dungeon belonging to a wizard, eventually finding themselves in his library. The treasure is inches away. Then the door and windows slam shut, there's a light show and a dizzying sense of transition. If the characters pry open the doors or window covers, they find themselves looking out into true nothingness - the void. The room was a trap, and it caught them. They've been dumped out of the world entirely.

Presumably the wizard will eventually call the room back, if only to reset the trap. But there's a dead and mummified adventurer here, which suggests that it could be a good long time. They need to rescue themselves, not wait.

The dead adventurer had an escape plan, which he laid out in a journal he had with him. The room could be shifted back into the world by tracing the path of a specific rune on foot and chanting a magical phrase to undo the trap magic. The biggest problem was that a single room isn't large enough to trace the rune.  It needs to be many squares long. However, it was possible to call additional rooms into the void, from structures similar to this room in concept (IE. dungeons). Then the issue would be digging through walls for access, defeating whatever threats came across with the architecture and building a walkable path through them.

The final journal entry states that a terrible void storm had begun and he was returning to the library for the little protection the bookshelves offered. Whatever rooms he managed to add are gone. If the PCs want to follow his plan, they'll need to start from scratch.

Obviously the characters have specific wants in the rooms they summon: food, building tools and supplies, construction that allows them to create openings where they need them. They'd also prefer those rooms to be unoccupied. Each additional criterion adds 1d3 to the difficulty of the magic roll for the summoning. If I was running I'd keep the players in the dark over whether they pass or fail until the room arrives, and remove one of the criteria for every point they fail by. They get a room regardless, but maybe not the one they hoped for.

I like the idea of using the random dungeon generator from Donjon. Hit random each time to get a different dungeon style, but set Details to basic to get a list of monsters and traps. Roll a die to pick which room they get. If the encounter die hits while they're in that room, it's something from the wandering monsters list, arriving some time after the room they occupied.

The characters have to work fast, because another possibility on the encounter die is a void storm. Storms last 1d6 turns, and while they're in progress, areas of the map simply pop out of existence. Erased by the void. Generating those randomly seem like too much effort, so I'd get the players to map out the dungeon they're constructing and drop d4s on their map to determine where the lacunae occur and how many squares in diameter they are. (D4s are indisputably the most evil of dice. Bastard pointy things.)

Choo choo

Skerples' Indefinite Train project got mentioned again on Reddit this week when user Goblinsh made a post to bring it more attention.  I agree that it's a worthwhile scheme.  A train hundreds of carriages long, travelling through worlds and planes, picking up random passengers and cargo as it goes.  The engineer may be a god escaping from an apocalypse, or travelling to one.  Anyone can contribute.

I've added a couple more carriages to my initial contribution, the dragon teppanyaki restaurant and the feuding Croshaw sisters' family car.  If you didn't believe my claim to have no artistic talent, this might convince you.  But I hope there's some usable game content in there.  'Unpolished but fun' is how I'd describe the project's pages.

My current favourites from the submissions are the broken robot factory and Murder on the Infinite Express.  Go and check them out.  They're worth your time.

Boarding now for parts unknown

Skerples has had a remarkable idea.  A dungeon in the form of a train that never stops, driven by a mysterious Engineer, staffed by inhuman Conductors and composed of carriages picked up across the multiverse.  He'd like stocking it with carriages to be a community effort, and reached out via his blog for submissions.  One of the example carriages is a giant cannon designed to fire goblins in padded suits at other cars, currently on fire.  The fire is inching its way towards the magazine, but the goblins are too busy fighting among themselves to do anything about it.  The other is a mouldering library operated by a mocking sphinx who only collects unreliable reference books and bad fiction.

My submission is a brew car operated by undead-hunting monks.  Staking vampires is no job to be doing sober, now is it?

Skerples is the creator behind Tomb of the Serpent Kings, reckoned to be one of the best introductory dungeons for newcomers to OSR-style play.  I confess, I've wanted to be part of a community-driven dungeon design since I first started reading OSR blogs last year, but usually showed up at the wrong time.  This time I'm in at the start.  Creating that carriage was a fun use of an afternoon.