Frogicorn Adventures!

Darin Shuler, the artist who did the back cover for The Purple Worm Graveyard just finished his weird and wonderful comic, The Frogicorn Adventure, Castle and Wood. It's wild and cool and worth checking out! Darin has a mad imagination (in the coolest sense of mad), and this comic has some really cool stuff in it, like a guy who digs up an ancient buried pillar only to find it covered with carvings of him digging up the various levels of the pillar. I'm totally putting that into one of my adventures.

Deeper into the Mines

Our Mines of Khunmar Dungeon World game has suddenly picked up momentum and two new players after a many month hiatus. Some months ago we left Karl von Ravenswood (intent up enforcing his family's erstwhile claim to rule the megadungeon, Ebag (refugee from a vengeful Thieves Guild) and Rumsfled (covetous hireling) leaping into a magical one-way portal deeper into the dungeon pursuing the displacer beast thief who had stolen the object of their current quest, The Eye of the Cyclops.

The cunning displacer beast led Karl on a chase through several blade traps (ouch), into an ancient hall where the beast got the better of Karl. By the time the rest of the party caught up (joined my Magnus, a friendly wandering mage), the displacer had Karl in a jam, knife to throat. The ensuing melee nearly cost Karl his life with numerous failed roles, culminating in the Displacer Beast escaping with the Eye after announcing many future badnesses for the party.

The brave crew decided their first order of business was to determine the path back to a place of safety, as they were now two levels deeper than their previous locale. Instead, they ran into a pair of battle-hardened orcs, trying to deduce how to get a treasure from a cursed statue. The ensuing melee nearly cost Karl his life, with Ebag suffering the effects of the curse and the surprisingly tough orcs escaping through a ghoul-infested level with the treasure.

Collecting their wits (and another fellow traveller, a cleric of evil disposition), they determined that the current level was once a wizards domicile and lab belonging to Karl's great-grandfather. Strangely, the family history says nothing of his experimentations. The party decided to clear the level and use it as a headquarters in their explorations after the escaped Displacer Beast.

Further exploration revealed a lab of unspeakable experiments, one of which took quite a bit of killing to dispatch. A trap was found which was mysteriously re-set as soon as the party left the room.

The tomb section of the level revealed a number of Ravenswood ancestors, doomed to eternal undead combat (though strangely, the wights did not view it as a curse). Declining their offer of undead torment, the party dispatched them to the realm of death with some difficulty, obtaining several great treasures.

So the mines is a big fat PDF of a megadungeon Stefan Poag wrote some time back. Now he's working on polishing it up and releasing it as a complete megadungeon! Also, there is a cool T-shirt you can buy of it.

HVAC

Kobold Theme Park

I drew this dungeon last year after our family trip to Disneyland. My daughter drew a picture of the roller coaster with unhappy-looking stick figures falling out of the cars. I guess we share some elements of our aesthetic. Disneyland was fantastic! I especially appreciated the efforts of the staff to go above and beyond to meet my daughter's dietary needs. But there's just something about a place that's so well-oilied that makes me want to introduce the element of chaos-hence the idea of a theme park run entirely by Kobolds.