One Page Dungeon Contest 2012

I hope you know about the One Page Dungeon Contest, because it's ending tomorrow. A month ago, I posted a dungeon map called The Haunted Tower of Forbidden Gods, and Ben Wray was kind enough to make an awesome writeup of it on Google+. So I turned Ben's writeup (sadly gutted for space, I'm afraid) into an entry for the contest. You can download The Haunted Tower of Forbidden Gods from my site and check it out.

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.

Jumping Jehosephat!

I never intended to print additional copies of The Purple Worm Graveyard. I mean, how many copies of a 12-page, half-pint D&D module can you really expect to sell? Apparently all of them! So a second printing is now in the works!

The Purple Worm Graveyard is Available

OK, now that vacations and Go Play NW are done with, I can finally get around to selling copies of The Purple Worm Graveyard! You can find it now at The Purple Worm Graveyard Home Page. The adventure was very well received at Go Play NW, with several people picking up copies, and one person even running it right there!

Hey, also if you're going to be at Gen Con, copies of The Purple Worm Graveyard will be available in the Indie Press Revolution booth, so you can save some shipping!

Art Preview!

I'm looking at the cover preview for an upcoming project, and it's extremely awesome!

Click to see the full image
This is an early preview of the cover for my Purple Worm Graveyard module. Eugene Jaworski is the artist. I think his old-school aesthetic is perfect for it. Plus he really knows how to draw monsters! Ed Heil is doing the interior artwork. I can't express how awesome it is to be able to hire professional artists. The work they do is pure magic.

Deeper into the Mines

Last night, Gabe, Phil, and I fired up Apocalypse D&D again to continue our adventure in the mines of Khunmar.

When we last left them, the party was trapped in a flooding room with the Antlion King. Ebag the Thief was unable to disable the trap, but with his enormous strength, Karl was able to bust down the door before Ston the Dwarf started to seriously drown. The Antlion King got away in the fracas, however.

Beyond the flooding room, behind a secret door, the party found the Antlions’ real treasure, a horde of coins and some minor magic items. As they were counting it out, however, a group of goblins entered through the *other* secret door. Seems they’d been skimming Antlion treasure for weeks. There was a tense standoff, and one of the frightened goblins shot Ebag with a crossbow (dropping him to -1 HP) before fleeing for their lives.

Some time later, in their search for the escaped King, the party discovered a large cavern where a group of ogres had set up a sort of bar where the various monster groups met in relative neutrality. Since several goblins were already there (including the party’s escaped prisoner Toe Snap), there followed a tense dinner discussion. The goblins ended by handing the party a couple of tasty adventure hooks, then slipping away into the gloom.

But here’s the thing. The goblins definitely got the better of the discussion, thanks to some failed rolls, and ended up handing the party a potentially deadly mission to a lost secret library haunted by a ghost. I was a little nervous that I might have set them up for a TPK, but their native caution served them well. Not only did they get out with the book the goblins wanted, but they avoided the ghost. They did leave behind a potential trove of good loot, however, so I have a hunch they may come back some day.

The adventure ended back at Happy Harry’s underground bar, where the party contemplated their next move, and heard rumors of a horrible creature from another dimension.

The Apocalypse D&D hack functioned very well, with only a couple of head-scratching moments (which can be addressed by fixing up the moves some more). The new trap hunting move worked pretty well. On a good roll, the party can pretty quickly traverse a decent expanse of dungeon safely, but there are still important choices to be made regarding where and how to hunt for traps.

In the Mines of Khunmar

Tuesday night, Phil and Gabe and I decided to throw off our monthly pool game and kick back at the pub for a game of D&D instead, and we were joined briefly by Brandon. I was psyched because I was itching to run an old-style dungeon crawl. Because I had some ideas I wanted to try out, we played a homebrew mashup of AD&D and Apocalypse World.* I also got to pull out the Mines of Khunmar, a pdf megadungeon I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time. *Spoilers Follow*

Phil made a fighting man named Karl, Gabe rolled up a thief named Ebag, and Brandon created a Dwarf Cleric named Stön. These three foolhardy souls were joined by two retainers named Rumsfeld and Griswold.

After circumventing a pit, they stumbled into an ambush of Antlions, cunning ant-like humanoids with a penchant for ambushes and trickery (turns out they can also stick to the ceiling, as Ebag discovered to his chagrin). The antlions underestimated their foes, however, and after a short fight, the party had a clear passage across the plank bridge over the raging underground river chasm to the Antlions hideout. Stön had heard that the Antlions had an illusionary treasure horde to fool interlopers, but that a real stash could be found a secret room nearby so they forged onward.

After the obligatory humanoid slaughter (where Griswold met his demise), there followed a tense struggle where Ebag surprised the Antlion king on his spinning secret door throne, pinning the king’s hand to the throne controls with a dagger at a crucial moment. The heroes extorted the king into revealing his true treasure horde. They failed, however, to extract a promise of safe passage, and the king sprung the treasure’s protective trap on the adventurers, a flooding room. The evening ended with the party trapped in a rapidly flooding room with the King mocking them with mad laughter as they all prepared for an evening of drowning. I do like a cliffhanger.

Hopefuly we’ll get to pick this game up again, because I really had a blast running it, and I think the players got into it too. We might play somewhere quieter next time, though, because the ambient sound at the pub really made it hard to get my DM-ing mojo on. Writing this blog has given me a real desire to play more D&D, and I rarely do, so this was a very nice treat.

* Apocalypse World is a game of Vincent Baker’s that I’ve been playtesting. It’s got some stuff that seems very unusual, but at its core it’s more old-school than anything else. I found it surprisingly easy to mash it together with AD&D.

Under Gavin's Woods One Room Dungeon

Yesterday I wrote up the adventure I ran over Wave using the Under Gavin's Woods map I posted yesterday. Here it is as a PDF. I used the one-page dungeon template created by Chgowiz. I love the one-page dungeon idea. Anything that makes dungeons easier to create and run is A+ in my books.

Gavin's Woods is a short dungeon crawl investigating the operations of a group of goblin bandits. The bandits turn out to be tied up in more than simple highway robbery. When I ran this over wave, the party was quite content to take out the goblins and collect their reward, leaving half the dungeon unexplored, which gives me plenty of stuff to work into the next adventure.

Oh yeah, if you're one of my players, don't worry about reading the adventure. I've already changed Nibsler's stats. :)