Two of my dungeons in action

It always makes me happy when other people play the dungeons I share here. I want to highlight the play-reports and versions made by A Level 3 Dork. They repurposed two of my dungeons for their OD&D campaign. My Maze of Amazement & Death became their Lair of the Serpent Men. And my Temple of the Berserkers was transformed into, well, another Temple of the Berserkers, only these Berserkers are UNDEAD, HELL YEAH

They are good examples of how far simple reskinning can go. Reskinning is an easy and fun way of integrating a dungeon into your campaign's setting. For example, my Temple of the Berserkers has remnants of modern technology - a CCTV security camera and a television screen. In A Level 3 Dork's version, the television screen became a scrying pool. My "14 Spiders" are transformed into "14 Child-Faced Spiders", yikes! In my version, I already had "Pale Children (as Goblins)" to make low level monsters more interesting, so such palette-swapping is part of the DNA of the adventures. 

A Level 3 Dork also writes that 

"Its really quite funny how two simple dungeons have led to nearly 10 sessions worth of play so far. Our next session will see an Undead Army of Berserkers (controlled by the PC’s, or so they think) going toe-to-toe with a small army of Gnolls."

So, let us all wish luck to the party on their path to becoming the baddies as leaders of an undead army!

"Comus" by Arthur Rackham

[Dungeon] Temple of the Forgotten God

This is a 16-room dungeon I wrote in about an hour for the OSR discord's community hexcrawl. I thought I would share it here too. Meat & potatoes OD&D-style experience. Minimal keying. Have fun!

Download as PDF here!

(now with enhanced map)

Update: enhanced map!

All rooms are hewn from the black basalt of the mountain. Ceilings are 8’ high unless otherwise noted. Doors are stone slabs that slide into the wall. One square = 10’.

Wandering monsters (2d4):

2 2 Robots in love

3 Black Pudding

4 1-10 Pixies

5 2-8 Reptiloids

6 2-12 Koblins

7 1-4 Vampire Bats

8 Time-travelling Thaumaturgist

Areas:

0. Entrance Chamber

The double doors are voice operated (react to OPEN and CLOSE commands uttered in the language of the Ancients). Labored breathing of a large creature can be heard beyond the second set of doors.

1. Trapped Dragon

20’ high ceiling held up by red pillars. Emaciated Adult Red Dragon (half HD), trapped here a decade ago by a cunning adventurer who knew the command words. The monster cannot fit through the doors towards #2 or #5. Small hoard of 1200 gp in the corner.

2. Trophy Room

Rusty weapons and shields (2 swords and 3 shields salvageable) on the walls. Thick layer of dust everywhere: trace of an approx. 3’ object dragged towards #4.

3. Locked Storage

Secret door: ventilation duct 6’ above the floor leads to a 4’ wide passage.

4. Drippy Area

Weird lemony green ooze drips from the walls. The object dragged over from #2 is a 3’ square extremely durable, yet light metal plate with handles.

5. Transitory Room

Doors to rooms #6-8 painted Orange, Yellow, Black.

6. Orange Door Room

Empty.

7. Yellow Door Room

6 Ghouls, transfixed, staring at a grainy TV screen. 

8. Black Door Room

Dark & squalid, walls painted black. Secret door: outline barely traceable below thick black varnish.

9. Healing Pool

Eerie blue glowing water. Murals on the walls depict nymphs bathing – sometimes laughter can be heard! A creature fully submerged in the water for 1 hour regains d4 hit points and, if poisoned, can repeat the save (this healing procedure is only effective 1/week). Partial submersion can lead to weird mutations.

10. Rug Maze

Garishly patterned rugs and curtains hang everywhere. Total value: 500 gp.

11. Crate Maze

Crates stacked high, easy to topple. 9 Dervishes lurk here, their leader holds the Pipes of Slumber (Sleep spell 1/day, but the wielder doesn’t heal from resting). 

12. Generator

Entrance partially obscured by crates. 10 Large Centipedes warming around an energy generator.

13. The Bone Gang

Entrance partially obscured by crates. 8 Skeletons, clearly a former group of adventurers (2 “fighters” with swords and shields, 1 “cleric” with mace and “unholy symbol”, 1 “magic-user” with a staff and a Scroll of Magic Missile, 4 “henchmen” with burnt-out torches and empty sacks). They guard a chest containing 4 rubies (500 gp ea.) and a gilded silver goblet (200 gp).

14. Ape Nest

Pool of dried blood before entrance. 2 White Apes lounging on dirty hay.

15. Wolf Lair

3 Giant Wolves, their hides colored blue (same hue as the pool in #9).

16. Garage

Functioning anti-grav skiff, with enough fuel for 2 days of operation. Seats 2 people.

Solo science fantasy hexcrawl - Session #2

Read previous installment here. This short session is the resolution of the combat that began at the end of the last...

Day 5 – continued [investigation in 1707, plains, favorable weather, random encounter in the afternoon]

Posidonios is ensnared! The wires cut into his flesh – and, alerted by his screams, the inhabitants of the place crawl forward… Four grotesque, goblinish figures, their wrinkly sky parchment dry and spotted. Some are emaciated and skeleton-like, some are potbellied. Dry and twisted, like the plains around them. In fact, they seem to have emerged from the barren ground itself.

Duke Seneb and Eucarpus, who are scavenging nearby, also hear the scream, but don’t come running just yet… They approach cautiously, behind the cover of the wreckage. They split up, Seneb circles to the right, Eucarpus to the left, weapons at ready.

The four creatures move closer to Posidonois. They aren’t in a hurry, and savor the kill. “What do have us here?” one of them whispers in a raspy tone. “We have us here some fresh meat,” the others reply in unison. They bare their pointy teeth. Posidonios screams.

“Get away from him!” shouts Eucarpus and rushes forward, brandishing his scimitar. The creatures are startled, and turn towards the fighting-man. “Well-well-well…” intones their leader. “Say, intruder, if you like our place so much, why don’t you just… stay with us? F o r e v e r . . .” The creature’s yellow eyes light up with an uncanny suggestive force. The mind of Eucarpus bends to the demonic will. “Y-yes, I wish to become one with the dust,” he mumbles.

Duke Seneb jumps out from his cover and mutters a string of syllables in an alien language. A cone of clashing colors erupts from his outstretched left hand. Eucarpus and the four monsters cry out in pain, cover their eyes, and fall to the ground. Duke Seneb runs over to Posidonois and tries to free him, but the wires of the snare are hard to cut. Knowing that the duration of his spell is limited, Seneb instead starts slashing the throats of the unconscious monsters. The ground swallows the black ichor instantly, without a trace.

But one of the creatures regains consciousness and raises up, blood splurting from its neck. It lunges at Seneb, but misses. “Get him,” he gurgles, and, to Seneb’s surprises, Eucarpus, who is by now also conscious and standing, charges Seneb. Seneb deflects the blade at the last minute and starts backing away. Posidonios, although his movements are hindered, tries to throw himself at Eucarpus, but the wires pull him back and he falls. Seneb faces two enemies alone – and one of these enemies used to be his comrade. “Snap out of it! It is me, Seneb,” he shouts as he tries and fails to hit the monster. But the charm is too strong, and Eucarpus cannot overcome it. “Must… kill the intruders… the sacred place must not be polluted,” he mumbles and buries his blade deep into Seneb’s body. Posidonios manages to free one of his legs, and kicks Eucarpus – who loses balance and also drops to the ground. This gives a bit of space for Seneb, and the Duke delivers a final blow to the last remaining monster.

“What happened?” gasps Eucarpus. A terrible hypnotic weight lifts from his mind with the death of the last creature. His two comrades are bleeding or bound. The bodies of the four monsters rapidly desiccate before their very eyes.

Duke Seneb shrugs, and tries to staunch his bleeding. Then together they free Posidonios. “Creatures of dust, the very soil of this wretched land,” Eucarpus verbalizes the weird phrases that still echo in his head. Then he points at a hole in the ground. “This is their burrow…” The underground hole hides a small hoard of 4,000 copper scales and a silvery metal diadem. This last object buzzes slightly when touched, and arcane glyphs light up on its inner surface. None of the adventurers feel up to the task of trying the diadem on… so this artifact will have to be identified at a later time.

For now, they set up camp in the cover of the wreckage and wait for the night to fall…

---------------

Notes: the generator gave me "spotted Dryads" with a Reaction of 2 - Hostile, so this is where I took it. Murderous barren plain dryads.

To be continued!

Solo science fantasy hexcrawl - Session #1

I played a ~2 hour solo hexcrawl session today, set in my weird pulpy science fantasy world. Every detail of the world is generated from a gigantic Inspiration Pad Pro file - it's over ten thousand lines, I've been working on it for a long time, adding new items, expanding word lists, etc. You might recall the settlements I posted before - they were sourced from this generator.

"Red Dward" by JustV23

So today I did a hexcrawl, with four random characters:

Characters:

Duke Seneb, hungry professional drunkard (Magic-User 1)

Sappho, heartbroken merchant (Fighter 3)

Eucarpus, exquisitely dressed archivist's husband (Fighter 2)

Posidonios, hideous servant of jeweler (Fighter 1)

Here's the write-up! Raw output (for comparison) in the comments.

Day 1 [entering hex 1309, plains with settlement, weather is neutral, no random encounter]

The story begins on the red salt-encrusted plains in the middle of nowhere. The village of Apollonia ad Rhyndacum stands here, a stop on the long north-south caravan road. A small community (pop. 170), clustered around a foul-smelling power plant (used to refuel any motored vehicles, but hated by locals) and a reconstructed caravanserai. Most buildings are of concrete. All of them are covered by a bright orange fungal infestation.

The exhausted party heads to the caravanserai’s bar. Their every movement is watched by the scary-looking human-shark hybrid bouncer. “Don’t cause any trouble here, fellas,” warns the barman, “Djed over there bites and is the best shot in town”.

Duke Seneb orders the cheapest, vilest drink, downs it, and orders two more.

The rest of the team consumes more cautiously. Sappho, who is currently unarmed, checks if there are any weapons for sale. The flamethrower on offer is too pricey, so she settles on a simple polearm.

Eucarpus inquires about the local situation. “Ask Pediamun,” says the barman and points towards a person who just entered: an older gentleman with unruly hair and haunted eyes, with a dirty puppet on his left hand. He immediately launches into a long-winded paranoid rant about how the orange mould is an alien organism and must be stopped. The only tool to stop the spreading is located in an ancient tech-orchard, some 30-40 miles to the north-east… and offers 800 silver shekels if the artifact (an occult microscope) is brought to him. Eucarpus agrees in the name of the party, then they drag Duke Seneb away from the bar and tie him to a bed upstairs in a rented room.

Day 2 [travelling from 1309 to 1408, jungle with ruins, unfavorable weather, no random encounter]

The party sets out towards the north-east first thing in the morning. Duke Seneb is hungover, so Eucarpus takes on navigational duties and pushes into the jungle that borders on the plains. The density of the vegetation, coupled with the slightly acidic rain makes the journey a nightmare. They don’t encounter hostile wildlife – or any wildlife, for that matter. An eerie silence sits over the jungle. By dusk, they arrive at some overgrown ruins. A collapsed gatehouse and explosion craters tell the story of a past conflict. The silence is deafening. And in the middle of all this – a pitched tent, intact, recent! Duke Seneb sneaks forward to inspect… after a minute of anticipation, he opens the flap – and finds the tent unoccupied! A large sack filled with stuff lies abandoned in the corner. Seneb rummages through it and finds some assorted adventuring equipment, but also a strange object: a discus, some 10” in diameter, made out of a diamond-like material. Seneb greedily grabs it – the discus flashes once – and Seneb is left with a weird sensation that something now is missing from his mind, or maybe not? He just sees that he is in a tent, which probably doesn’t belong to him, but who are these three people that rush in shouting “Seneb, what happened? What was that flash?”

Science fantasy Harpist class

The science fantasy Harpist class is a character type for OD&D/BX/whathaveyouish games. It is based on the lyrists and bards from pulp fiction, who can manipulate emotions or matter with their music. See, for example, one of the protagonists in "The Jewels of Bas" by Leigh Brackett (I wrote about it in this post), and other appearances of lyres in Brackett's sword & planet fiction. I was also influenced by the description of the "Pipes of Killorn" in "Swordsman of Lost Terra" by Poul Anderson. 

“It was like the snarling music of any bagpipe, and yet there was more in it. There was a boiling tide of horror riding the notes, men's hearts faltered and weakness turned their muscles watery. Higher rose the music, and stronger and louder, screaming in the dales, and before men's eyes the world grew unreal, shivering beneath them, the rocks faded to mist and the trees groaned and the sky shook. They fell toward the ground, holding their ears, half blind with unreasoning fear and with the pain of the giant hand that gripped their bones and shook them, shook them.” (Poul Anderson, “Swordsman of Lost Terra”, Planet Stories, Nov. 1951)

So basically it's a D&D bard, but with science fantasy flavor for the powers.

			Saving Throw vs.					Powers / day
Lvl	Exp	HD	Poison	Wands	Paralysis	Breath	Spells	1	2	3
1	0	1	13	14	13	15	13	1
2	1,500	1+1	12	14	12	14	12	2
3	3,000	2	12	14	12	14	12	2	1
4	6,000	2+2	11	11	11	13	11	2	2
5	12,000	3+1	11	11	11	13	11	2	2	1
6	25,000	4	10	11	10	12	10	3	2	1

 

	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3
1	Charm Person	Deflect Missiles, 10’	Charm Monster
2	Comprehend Languages	Deflect Rays	Confusion
3	Deflect Missiles	Enthrall	Destabilize Matter
4	Identify	Forget	Disrupt Force Field
5	Message	Hidden Message	Heroic Frequency
6	Radionics	Hold Person	Radionics, Group Therapy
7	Sleep	Silence, 15’	Suggestion
8	Ventriloquism	Siren Song	Warm Earth Music for Plants

 

See the full post for the Descriptions of powers:

[Dungeon] Maze of Amazement ( & Death ), one-page adventure for OD&D/Delving Deeper

So, if keying the entirety of The Maddening Corridors of Nuclear Chaos is not really a viable option, what can we do with it?

Well, we can cut it up and use a part of it as a complete dungeon!

I divided up The Maddening Corridors map into 36 quadrants, took a random one (by rolling two six-siders), cut it into half, edited out some errant corridors and superfluous exits; and ended up with a 60-ish room dungeon.

The next step of the exercise was to key it. I followed the basic procedure of my two previous OD&D efforts (Temple of the Berserkers and Outpost of Stone & Silver): stocked it quickly using Delving Deeper (made even quicker through Inspiration Pad Pro automation), then edited as needed...

You can fit 61 rooms on a single page... Of course, the key becomes very minimal, but still, I think this is playable. See for yourselves:

Download PDF with map & key!

Enjoy!

UPDATE 2025: A Level 3 Dork turned this into The Lair of the Serpent Men! Compare & contrast to see how far a little re-skinning can take you in making a dungeon your own.

Players' maps for the OD&D adventures (Temple of the Berserkers and Outpost of Stone & Silver)

I know a lot of people use virtual tabletops, especially in these quarantine days. Or just like to have something to show to the group. So I made players' maps for the two OD&D dungeons I published recently. These versions come without any text labels, and the traps and secret doors are masked. They probably don't line up perfectly with the 70px grids, but I'm sure you can get that to work... (oh, and the maps are on a 1 square = 10' scale).

You can get them here:

Players' maps & PDFs

[Actual Play] A Delve into the Outpost of Stone & Silver [Carcosa / OD&D]

Yesterday I ran the Outpost of Stone & Silver for two players (as a quick and dirty one-shot when the regular game was called off). They grabbed two characters each from R. Sivaranjan's generator and off we went!

Kahlo (He of the Fabulous Eye-Brow), Red Fighting-Man 1

Steel of Woe, Green Fighting-Woman 1, one-armed and psionic

Luu, Orange Fighting-Man 1

Ranko (She of the Superior Hit Point Pool), Brown Fighting-Woman 1

Our ragtag group of adventurers, all outcasts of their respective tribes, learned about the existence of a sorcerous or scientific outpost, with shining metal walls built into the purple rock. They set out with high hopes: perhaps their tribes would take them back if they came bearing treasures...

They arrived to the place with their pack-lizard and cart. They saw two entrances: one set in a niche, and another set between two tower-like edifices. The bravest, Luu, approached the first one, and noticed that it had no door - but the passage was barred by a flickering curtain of light. He threw some objects at it, trying to match his projectile with the on/off phase of the curtain, but learned that all objects just bounce back, cause electric discharges, and overheat when connecting with the field.

He was about to head back, when he noticed some sounds from beyond the curtain, but he couldn't see the source, as the corridor was only slightly illuminated by the twin suns.

To his surprise, he received an answer in a child-like voice. The friendly creature on the other side invited him to join a knife-throwing contest. Luu was wary, and called a group meeting. In the meantime, they could hear that the contest commenced inside. There were sounds of knives hitting the wall, and the disappointed murmurs of a small crowd. And then, finally, a cheer -- and, to their surprise, together with the cheer, the curtain of light dissipated! 

[Dungeon] Outpost of Stone & Silver, science fantasy adventure for OD&D/Delving Deeper

Temple of the Berserkers received a very warm welcome, so here's a follow-up! Outpost of Stone & Silver is in the same format: dungeon map + keys that fit on one page (or two pages, if you want larger font). It's a science fantasy adventure, in the spirit of Gamma World or Carcosa. A mysterious science outpost/laboratory, built into a mountain - who knows what lies in its depths?

This time, instead of the OD&D booklets, I used the guidelines of Delving Deeper, a great iteration of the 0e rules.

To achieve the science fantasy feel, I re-skinned all fantasy regulars. Goblins became bug-eyed monsters, skeletons became flayed androids, giant snakes and spiders turned into robot arms and patrol drones*. I must admit that I'm kinda proud of turning the "Red Dragon, Hatchling" entry into a flamethrower turret... And if the dragon is asleep, then the turret is just "on hold"...

So yeah, I had a lot of fun. Aaaand I added a reference of something that'd made a big impression on me in my childhood. That's always nice.

Download PDF with map & key!*

* 2020.08.24 - now with a player map, with secret doors and labels hidden!

* Technically, Delving Deeper has stats and even descriptions for robots, cyborgs, etc. (unlike OD&D, where the "Robots, Golems, Androids" are "self-explanatory monsters which are totally subjective as far as characteristics are concerned"...). But those monsters are too strong, I wanted something weaker. + Re-skinning is more fun.

Have fun, and, as always, let me know what you think!

[Dungeon] Temple of the Berserkers, one-page OD&D adventure

 As a little exercise, I drew a dungeon and stocked it according to the guidelines in the 3 original Dungeons & Dragons booklets. Behold, the Temple of the Berserkers!

Download PDF with map & key!*

(for a one-page adventure, print "2 pages on 1 sheet")

* 2020.08.11 - updated the file with a new map and a couple of minor edits.
Big thanks to John Bragg for spotting the error in the elevation levels!

* 2020.08.24 - now with a players' map, with traps, secret doors and labels hidden!

Workflow:

I started with the map (because I love drawing maps). 40-ish rooms, interconnections, etc., and I added some features like statues and secret doors right away. Then I reserved the bigger or more peculiar rooms as "specials", but didn't put anything in them yet.

Instead, I went through the rest of the areas, stocking them randomly, as a level 1 dungeon. The OD&D procedure is clunky (and can be substituted with a single-roll stocking method), but I used it more or less as written. Next, I rolled up random monsters for each populated room.

At this point, due to a freak coincidence, I rolled Berserkers three times. And so, a theme emerged. A temple/dungeon mostly overtaken by Berserkers, and a couple of other creatures and NPCs, who are either their leaders, allies, or, in some cases, enemies they can't get rid of.

With this theme set and most rooms stocked, I returned to the specials and adjusted them to fit the theme (or not fit the theme, as OD&D dungeons are not supposed to be all logical...). 

I like how it all came out and it was fun to make. Enjoy!