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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5711262" data-attributes="member: 177">First, if you're not familiar with the concept already, go read up on <a href="http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=156#1" target="_blank">The Five Room Dungeon</a>.  We'll wait...Okay, so here's the setup.  I'm running a Classic Deadlands campaign, and, as usual, the PCs are not doing what I expected they'd do. Usually, though, they are more clever than I plan for, and this time, they aren't.At the start of the campaign, I put then in Dodge City, Kansas, and while they've wandered away occasionally, they tend to return.  In their first session in Dodge, I gave them a plot hook that corpses left on the fields around dodge (there was Union/Confederate fighting going on) were tending to disappear overnight.  They chose not to follow up on it.So, of course, it is coming back into focus now.  There's been little fighting in the area.  The number of folks dying in Dodge and its environs from random violence is down, and the nest of ghouls that lives under the city's graveyard and were feeding on the dead is low larger than the food supply can support.  The ghouls are starting to get more aggressive about finding food, though they haven't attacked anyone living, yet.  The players have stumbled on to this.Normally, these characters would do a lot of investigation, find out how big the ghoul population is, maybe even try to negotiate (Deadlands ghouls are not geniuses, but are sentient), and so on.  Instead, they just decided to gear up and dive into the ghouls' warren.  What they don't realize is that they are hopelessly outmatched.  If I run this as a straight tactical dungeon crawl, and run the ghouls as the intelligent masters of their domain that they should be, the party would be dead in short order - the ghouls would probably lure them into a smallish chamber, collapse it in on them, and when they'd suffocated, dig them back out and eat their tasty, tasty flesh.  So, that being less than fun, I won't do it.  I'm thinking of turning the ghoul's lair into a 5 room dungeon. "Rooms" are a bit of an abstraction.  The warren covers at least a half mile radius, possibly more.  Ghouls are normal people who have, for some reason, stooped to cannibalism and been transformed into monsters by their acts.  They hate the light, stink to high heaven, but don't have the D&D-style paralysis touch.  In the warren has a "Ghoul King", bigger, smarter, and more potent than the run of the mill ghoul.  There's a whole lot of ghouls in this nest, but not much other fluff or backstory for them otherwise.So, here's the challenge:  Give me your Five Room Ghoul Nest!  Don't worry too much about mechanics, I can convert concepts into Deadlands rules easily enough.</blockquote>

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