D&D General #Dungeon23

M_Natas said:

Having some catching up to do after a nasty stomach bug. Also need to prepare my spelljammer game I run next Sunday... so here we go:

Day 156 to 165 - Asteroid field

Day 156: Stonewall: Stonewall appears as a solid, grayish-brown asteroid composed entirely of rugged, weathered stone. It has a pockmarked surface, revealing the countless impacts it has endured over the ages.
Day 157: Frostbite: This asteroid is covered in a thick layer of glacial ice, giving it a glistening, frozen appearance. Frigid winds whip across its surface, making it inhospitable to most forms of life.
Day 158: Dustwhisper: Dustwhisper is a dusty asteroid with a dry, barren surface. Fine particles of dust and sand constantly swirl in the asteroid’s thin atmosphere, creating an eerie haze that obscures vision.
Day 159: Cobblestone: Cobblestone is a medium-sized asteroid featuring a patchwork of various types of stone, forming a mosaic-like terrain. The stones range in size and color, giving it a unique and uneven appearance.
Day 160: Iceberg Haven: This large asteroid resembles a massive floating iceberg, with only a fraction of its icy bulk visible above the surface. It has an intricate network of tunnels and caves carved into the ice, providing shelter for hardy explorers.
Day 161: Slatewind: Slatewind appears as a flat, slate-gray asteroid with a few scattered boulders dotting its surface. It is frequently buffeted by strong winds, which make eerie, haunting sounds as they whistle through narrow crevices.
Day 162: Crystal Hollow: This asteroid appears unremarkable from the outside, but within its core lies a vast network of crystal caverns. The caverns are filled with stunning formations, radiating soft, colorful hues when illuminated.
Day 163: Ironhide: Ironhide is a dense asteroid composed primarily of iron ore, giving it a dark, metallic appearance. Its magnetic field is unusually strong, affecting nearby metallic objects and causing compasses to go haywire.
Day 164: Quicksilver: Quicksilver is a small, shimmering asteroid covered in a layer of liquid mercury. The mercury constantly ripples and shifts, reflecting light in a mesmerizing manner, but caution is advised due to its toxic nature.
Day 165: Granite Fields: This asteroid is characterized by vast fields of rugged granite boulders scattered across its surface. It resembles a rocky wasteland, offering limited resources but serving as a potential hiding place for those seeking solitude.

Hidden Secrets:

Havenstead: Within one of the seemingly mundane asteroids lies a hidden Thorp called Havenstead. Disguised as an ordinary rock, it conceals a small community of space-faring individuals who have carved out a humble living in the depths of the asteroid.
Nebula’s Bounty: A seemingly unremarkable farming asteroid hides a secret farm cultivating rare and exotic space crops. The farmers utilize advanced technology and controlled environments to grow peculiar alien fruits and vegetables.
Frostvine Manor: Concealed within an icy asteroid is Frostvine Manor, an isolated estate where an enigmatic noble family dwells. They have developed a unique technique to farm an otherworldly plant that thrives in the harsh cold, possessing rare and valuable properties.
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#166 - "The Sandwich" - two granite fields that keep bumping against each other like gnashing teeth, threatening to crush anything that must pass between them (and there's a reason to try...)

gorice said:

Also, I've avoided prodding anyone about their updates, because no-one needs that, but I hope you are all well and I look forward to seeing anything you produce.

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I've actually been getting back into working on it, or at least coming up with ideas - a lot faster than I can draw them.

So... when the dwarven settlement that constitutes my "dungeon(s)" collapsed into the earth, it shattered into chunks, some more whole than others - it looks a lot like a partially-assembled 3D jigsaw puzzle of an M.C. Escher picture, with all the still-missing parts filled in with solid stone. There are parts that are fairly large and fully intact pieces of a single layer (or two or three), some that ended up settling on their side or even upside down, and there are others that look more like a geological core sample - small in area but many layers deep. Because the settlement inside the mountain had a river that flowed down the slope of the outside from the plateau at the top, the dwarves cleverly used small carved channels through the rock walls inside the place to provide running water to the entire complex. Now that it looks like your little cousin's big box of LEGOs, some random sections have become flooded because those "pipes" either shattered and released all the river water or allowed the seawater that flowed over the ruins (and that eventually became the swamp) to funnel in. Narratively, this means that although most of the 500-odd dwarves were crushed or otherwise died of injuries, a number of them also either drowned or were suffocated when they became trapped and their air ran out.
One of those "core-sample" sections is going to contain some living quarters on the upper levels, and a mine level or possibly two on the bottom. The lowest level is going to be partially flooded. In the living quarters, the party may find the diary of a young girl, who's last entry tells of her excitement at the prospect of her father bringing her and her siblings down to the mine to bring their mother (the supervisor of that lowest mine level) her lunch at her office.

When the party reaches that mostly-collapsed and partially flooded level, they'll discover that the 10-ft tall corridors are all flooded - the water in this section is almost 20-ft deep - but that the small section of the collapsed mine area they can reach (A on the map, with its 30-ft ceiling) has a limited amount of breathable air in it.

(Hastily-sketched map)



Across the corridor from the mine entrance is Maeveena's office (B) - there's a long set of stairs carved out of the stone parallel to the corridor, rising up 20 feet to the open non-flooded area outside her office. When the party gets near Maeveena's office, they discover she's still there...
Maeveena is a special kind of banshee - being immaterial, she can materialize anywhere within 60 feet of (M) as a move action, and attacks by pummeling a character for two attacks (dealing necrotic damage).
She has a legendary action - at the start of her turn she lets loose a scream of rage and pain so hot that it actually causes the water around her to boil in a 30-ft radius, and which refreshes on a 3 or less on1D6... It also suppresses any waterbreathing magic the party may have until the end of the round. Characters in the water take damage and must make a DC 20 CON saving throw or suffer a level of exhaustion as they struggle to keep from drowning, and steam fills the entire area until the end of the next turn (the whole area becomes heavily obscured, and Maeveena is considered to be invisible). The party can give themselves a bit of respite by retreating into the collapsed mine section, as Maeveena and her powers can't quite reach them there, but there's only a limited amount of air there.

Maeveena isn't so much a monster encounter as an environmental hazard - defeating her in combat is absolutely doing it "the hard way". The party is meant to eventually talk her down and convince her to pass on to the next world.

Each time she screams, the wall of her office begins to crack a little bit more, and there's a cumulative 20% chance each time that the wall will suddenly crumble, revealing the reason for Maeveena's rage and despair - the well-preserved bones of her and her family, who became trapped in her office when the corridor outside it collapsed.
When the wall to her office collapses, Maeveena will spend three rounds simply staring at their bodies, shrieking and crying in rage and frustration - clearly her current undead status is the result of a mother's desperate and ultimately futile determination to hold out and keep her family alive until help arrived.
The party can try to use that time (and the information they hopefully uncovered while exploring her family's living quarters above) to try to convince her to stop attacking, making a DC 20 Persuasion check each round... (If they fail by more than 5, she starts attacking again, and the DC increases to 30, and by 5 each failed check afterward. If they continue to attack her, they're in for one hell of a fight...)
Maeveena, in life, was a kind, caring person and a devoted mother, and once she's convinced to stop attacking she can be convinced (after an additional series of successful Persuasion checks) that it would be best for her family for her to let go of her inconsolable rage and grief and join them in the afterlife.

Now I just need to map out all the rest of that particular chunk, probably eight or ten rooms on each of the six or seven housing/workspace/otherstuff levels and then the first mine level (and some other random bits of the bottom level reachable by other ways down...

Day 167 to 176 – Peregrin Farm

Peregrin Farm is a small asteroid where, for some inexplicable reason, plants and crops grow well. The Peregrin family, elves and halflings, lived here and produced food for the surrounding asteroid settlements.
However, a pirate ship came along and kidnapped most of the family.
The granny of the family managed to hide in the cellar with the baby.
The pirates left a vampirate behind to raid other passing ships.

Buildings:
167 – landing platform

Main house
168 – Hallway
169 – Living room
170 – Granny’s bedroom
171 – Kitchen
172 – storage room

173 – Outside toilet
174 – Stable

Secondary house
175 – Kitchen
176 – Bedroom

Ok I'm back! I don't know if it is #dungeon23 per se, as it is not a mega dungeon, but I did start a new large dungeon.

The problem I'm trying to address with this dungeon is how to effectively represent both horizontal and vertical space on the same map in a way that radically increases opportunities for Jacquaysing. Traditional dungeon maps, aside not being at all related to how people actually build buildings, are actually quite small and flat; verticality can be represented by stairs of course but usually just to the next level and usually in a way that can be difficult to parse (though that can be the charm of them). Sideview maps need to be paired with horizontal ones. Isometric maps are hard to draw especially for large scale environments. Pointcrawls allow for larger spaces, but don't fundamentally solve this problem.

I wrote about this here, but basically my thought was that a metro map could be used to express horizontal and vertical connections together, with each "line" of the metro representing a lower depth. My original #dungeon23 idea was just to do an actual metro, with the stations being the weekly dungeons, but drawing the maps was too time consuming.

Anyway, so I started again, this time with a more straightforward concept of a large cave system. I drew each "line" by rolling 4d6. The numbers on the die also correspond to what kind of thing the PCs find at that location (creature, faction, environmental hazard, path back to surface).



I kept doing this until I had all the lines. If a die naturally fell next to an existing location, then that was a connection between lines. Otherwise, I made connections at some areas where lines crossed each other. The end result was this

\

Ideally, I would draw each location in a more conventional form and key it. But I found that the map drawing was the most time consuming part of the project, and what led to burnout/not having enough time initially. So I'm just going to describe them. There are some 34 locations in all, and I'll probably make 3-4 factions.

Malmuria said:

Ok I'm back! I don't know if it is #dungeon23 per se, as it is not a mega dungeon, but I did start a new large dungeon.

The problem I'm trying to address with this dungeon is how to effectively represent both horizontal and vertical space on the same map in a way that radically increases opportunities for Jacquaysing. Traditional dungeon maps, aside not being at all related to how people actually build buildings, are actually quite small and flat; verticality can be represented by stairs of course but usually just to the next level and usually in a way that can be difficult to parse (though that can be the charm of them). Sideview maps need to be paired with horizontal ones. Isometric maps are hard to draw especially for large scale environments. Pointcrawls allow for larger spaces, but don't fundamentally solve this problem.

I wrote about this here, but basically my thought was that a metro map could be used to express horizontal and vertical connections together, with each "line" of the metro representing a lower depth. My original #dungeon23 idea was just to do an actual metro, with the stations being the weekly dungeons, but drawing the maps was too time consuming.

Anyway, so I started again, this time with a more straightforward concept of a large cave system. I drew each "line" by rolling 4d6. The numbers on the die also correspond to what kind of thing the PCs find at that location (creature, faction, environmental hazard, path back to surface).

View attachment 288866View attachment 288867

I kept doing this until I had all the lines. If a die naturally fell next to an existing location, then that was a connection between lines. Otherwise, I made connections at some areas where lines crossed each other. The end result was this

View attachment 288868\

Ideally, I would draw each location in a more conventional form and key it. But I found that the map drawing was the most time consuming part of the project, and what led to burnout/not having enough time initially. So I'm just going to describe them. There are some 34 locations in all, and I'll probably make 3-4 factions.

View attachment 288869

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Jumpin' jiminy christmas! Quite beautiful

I look forward to seeing whatever comes out of this - thanks for sharing

Alright, I'm going to start work tomorrow, trying to do two rooms a day. I've got two ideas for it. The first idea is to make an inter-dimensional dungeon based in my inter-dimensional city of Cynos (sure, you know what it's based on). So it will be 20 levels, one for each of the four elemental spheres, and one for each of the sixteen outer spheres in my cosmos. The second idea is to have the dungeon follow the Four Color Map Theorem, which states that any map can be colored with only four colors with no adjacent regions having the same color. So there will be four types of rooms (empty, trap, creature, and other), and no two adjacent rooms will be of the same type.

I will be doing this in hybrid media. I have a lot of graph paper sitting around, so I will use that for the maps. The room descriptions will be in markdown files. I will see you next week with my first post.

Picked up the pencil last night and wrote out the top level of my tower. There are 7 locations to write up, the last one is the castle that's been in stasis/abandoned for X hundred years - which means I will actually be drawing up a room by room dungeon after all!

Also today the venture teaser came to me in the car. I had to pull over and record it onto my phone. I have transcribed it and edited it and would LOVE feedback

A thousand years ago, on the Plateau of Kar, the Tower arrived. They say it arrived at night, in fire and flood - descending from the sky and settling in the middle of the Lake of Tears. Vaguely looking like a twenty mile high tree, the locals immediately began to call it Yggdrasil, the World Tower. Soon after its arrival, grey floating objects that didn't seem to be powered by anything, left from the upper reaches of the Tower. While the Tower did not seem to interact with the denizens of the Plateau, travelers to Kar told tales of sky ships that would land among civilized peoples; capture many, and kill many more, and then leave. Rumor was that those captured never returned. Was that related to the Tower?

Locally, new fearsome creatures were said to swim in the lake near the Tower. Oddly, the creatures seemed to focus on capsizing boats, ships, rafts - and devouring the sailors. Within a year or two, no one traveled near the Tower. The Tower sat, silently, and faded into the background

Five hundred years ago, someone noticed that the objects (the ships?) no longer seemed to be leaving the Tower. It roughly coincided with the decade long "Season of Lights" - a period where near the top of the Tower lights shimmered across and over the crown. Reports of the giant sky ships ended in the historical record around this time as well. Could it be the Tower was now dormant? Ah - but the lake creatures were still there... After the Seaon of Lights, the Tower sat, silently, and faded into the background

Three hundred years ago, a thread of bright light lanced from the top of the tower up into the sky. For the first century, "beads" of light would travel up and down the thread of light, although about two hundred years ago, that also stopped. So it had been for the past 200 years, the thread of light shimmering from the distant top of a still, strange Tower. The Tower sat, silently, and faded into the background

Thus it has been - The Tower does something, but the Plateau is basically unaffected. So - eventually the peoples of the Plateau of Kar, they begin to forget. Every once in a while it is noticed - "oh my gosh, there's that Yg" but quickly fading again from consciousness as daily life is so urgent - much like a mountain in the distance is suddenly noticed.

One month ago, there was a tremendous earthquake. The Tower survived the earthquake - but one end of the lake has been breached, and the lake has started to drain. The city of Bran where the breach occurred has been devastated, and three weeks of disaster recovery has been happening as the lake level lowers, and lowers, and lowers

Last week, a crack or cave in the side of the tower was revealed.

Yesterday, for the first time in recorded history, a land bridge to the Tower was revealed.

This morning - you have chosen to enter The Tower of Yg

I powered through the whole dungeon! Well sort of. I stopped trying to make my notebook perfect, which meant that I stopped drawing maps or trying to make sure I have everything I would even need to run this. So if I want to run it I'll have to copy it over to a digital format and flesh it out quite a bit (everything from treasure to descriptions to room size). Instead the notebook was just for ideas and to get a rough sketch of what the overall map would look like

What the map ended up looking like:




33 locations in all.
PS. shout out to the OSE referee's tome! I know it's just a restatement of b/x but I really love the bullet point format and the ease of use. The short descriptions, plus whatever monster lore I have stashed in my head, were all I needed to come up with some basic notes on creature lairs. I rolled on the tables to get ideas, and it really does your dungeon an old school feel. And a larger than expected # of the monsters are actually included in the OGL! Maybe I'll work on publishing this?

Anyway, not really a #dungeon23 megadungeon, but a scaled down version of what I had initially intended. It does make me wonder how many finished megadungeons we'll get at the end of the year. Sean McCoy himself said he was just doing 1 sentence room descriptions. It seems like a lot more work to make that into something playable let alone something publishable. As he predicted, the initial enthusiasm waned as life intervened.

Malmuria said:

Anyway, not really a #dungeon23 megadungeon, but a scaled down version of what I had initially intended. It does make me wonder how many finished megadungeons we'll get at the end of the year. Sean McCoy himself said he was just doing 1 sentence room descriptions. It seems like a lot more work to make that into something playable let alone something publishable. As he predicted, the initial enthusiasm waned as life intervened.

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I've always intended to make it something I can publish later (if I'm going to go to all this trouble, I might as well do something with the finished product), but that also meant accepting that whatever I was writing this year would be an initial draft only. I think the full process of mapping, keying, testing, revising, writing up stat blocks, etc. is not really feasible for a daily writing activity. I've stuck to keying and mostly left the rest for later, and it's interesting to see how different people have approached the same problem.

I like your subway map, BTW. I might have to try something similar! Veticality is something I always want more of in a dungeon, and I've struggled to find ways of representing it that are both legible on a map and functional in play. My best attempt in this megadungeon has been my necropolis level, which is a spiral with vertical connection points for shortcuts.

As promised, here's the final week of June's level. Next week: biomechanical nightmare zone!

22: Tortoise

• An ancient tortoise the size of a carriage. Someone has drawn obscene graffiti on its shell.
• (?) The tortoise would be grateful for a clean shell. The apes make fun of it.

23: Hothouse

• A hothouse of cracked and dirt-streaked glass.
• Within, white pebble paths and an explosion of colourful plants with bizarre fruits.
• (??) d6 fruit finder:
  • 1 = striped, ordinary fruit, albeit a bizarre hybrid
  • 2 = ultramarine, overwhelming perfume
  • 3 = cyan, venomous spines, but delicious inside
  • 4 = magenta, soporific poison, dizzying musk
  • 5 = peuce, attempts to bite back with little toothed mouths
  • 6 = emerald, woody and inedible, but seeds are actual emeralds worth 5 coins

24: Mushroom Patch

• A generous patch of wrinkly red mushrooms under a burnt-out stand of trees. Strange chemical smell.
• (!) Mushrooms are poisonous and highly, explosively flammable. Even the air nearby is full of explosive gas.

25: Bamboo Thicket

• A maze of bamboo plants the size of trees, whistling in the breeze.

26: Stone Garden

• An overgrown square with great mossy stones.
• (!) The stones are actually ambulatory, with crab-like appendages that they keep hidden when observers are near. This means that they are in different positions each time the PCs pass through.

27: Wind Demon’s Lair

• (!) Lair of an invisible stalker. Haunts the nearby forest and thickets. You can hear (but not feel) its presence, a breeze that hisses through foliage and whistles through bamboo. The stalker has an invisible lash with a grapnel that it uses as a hook and garrotte. The demon delights in tormenting its prey, and wishes for souls and trophies.
• (?) The lair is filled with odd trophies — skulls, costume jewellery, feathers, teeth, charms and baubles. The fistful actually valuable jewellery is worth 5 coins.

28: Ziggurat Stair

• Stairs of stone with marble rails supported by kneeling caryatids. At their end: the great stone doors, snarling basalt lions, open just wide enough to admit a person.
• (!) : By the doors: the Peacock Knight, fiercest of the forest knights.
• (?) The doors lead to the palace courtyard (L4).

29: Pomegranate Door

• Marble stairs lead to cyclopean doors of stone, carved as a pomegranate in relief. Marble statues join hands over the entrance; they are scabbed with moss and vines. Fleshy growths spill from breaks in their hollow bodies.
• (?) The doors are unlocked, if stiff. They lead to the womb of monsters (L3).
• (?) The growths in the statues are shrike demon eggs.

30: Picnic Area

• Rusting iron frames of benches and tables, home to moss and caterpillars.