Idylls of the Rat King - and Mines!

[Schmoe]

I'm going to be starting a new 3rd edition campaign soon. While browsing my shelf for interesting 1st level adventures to use, I came across Idylls of the Rat King, the very first in the Dungeon Crawl Classics series by Goodman Games. The adventure looked promising, and it even won an honorable mention ENnie back in 2003. The problem is, the dungeon is just bad. It's supposed to be a silver mine, but the only way to the majority of the mines is through a convoluted series of tunnels and chambers and then down a small grate. The place is rife with secret doors and secret rooms, which just doesn't make sense to me for a mine.

Despite that, I like the story. There is an interesting back story to the main villain, and I have some great ideas to tie it into old treachery and further developments. The town of Silverton is a good place for a starting campaign. It has enough information that I can flesh it out to provide a home base for the characters to grow attached, and it's easy to place as a frontier village with ruins and adventure just a short travel away.

So I have a couple of questions for people. First, does anyone here have any experience with this module? If so, what kind of advice do you have, and what were your experiences with it?

Second, I am really tempted to rework the entire dungeon layout. Does anyone have any suggestions on resources for creating an interesting dungeon based on an abandoned silver mine?

 

[Schmoe]

Well, I decided that I was wholly unsatisfied with the module as written. There are some good ideas in it, and I can certainly re-use a lot of the content within it, but it needed a major overhaul for how I like to run my games. Given that, I've put some effort into the overhaul, so I figured I would share here. I re-did the maps, I added a surrounding area, I fleshed out the town of Silverton and the families therein, and I added some intrigue and motivations to what's going on, along with some hooks to further adventure. If anyone is interested, I have links below. You'll need the original module to make sense of the mine maps, but the town, overland area, and everything else is should be completely independent of the module.

Cheers!

Overland map
Town and mines maps
Town and area details

 

[ccs]

Cool, thanks for sharing.

My own group had a great time with the sequel.
At the time I didn't have access to the 1st one, so I just had the Rat King conducting a full on live trial of his killer dungeon on the party - prepping it for some other group that had offended him.

 

[Schmoe]

Interesting, thanks. What was your impression of the sequel, high points and low points? I don't have it and don't really know the first thing about it. If it was a good adventure, though, I may have to check it out! Right now I have this one leading to further adventures either in Caverns of Thracia or in a mega-dungeon of my own making. If the sequel needed a lot of work I'll probably skip it, as I need something with less prep required after all the work I did on this one. But I'm always happy to add more potential adventure hooks for the group.