Three silver figurines, or "Our occult shrine got flooded so now we're pretty bummed"

 

Just a dumb one page thing today! Trying to think minimalistic.

So this site is just some simple (from the outside) two rooms shrine (two separate doors). It is built in stone, but lacks all sorts of ornaments.

In each of the two rooms, a statue is present. There's nothing special about them; bog standard "important man looking into the distant, not knowing where to put his arms". One is missing its nose.

The round, barred window is located in a space between the front doors. It should give a hint to the "hidden" area between the two rooms. There are no other light sources inside the shrine.

In one of the rooms, the entrance to the (now hidden) area has been bricked up long ago by the original worshippers of the shrine, in an attempt to imprison the Changing Beast they managed to summon one night.

The flooded area has a narrow (30 cm wide), winding staircase following the four walls, leading all the way down to the bottom (30 meter). This area wasn't always under water.

At the bottom, besides broken pottery and glass vials, the following things can be found:

1. Silver figurine (30 cm tall, tarnished). Two arms up in the air (leftmost figurine in the image above)
   
2. Silver figurine (40 cm tall, tarnished). Four arms spread like an X (middle figurine in the image above)
   
3. Silver figurine (50 cm tall, tarnished). Alien look (rightmost figurine in the image above)
   
4. Skeleton in plate armour
5. A broken sword
   
6. A bottle of spoiled wine in a otherwise empty chest
   

The skeleton remains (item 4 above) is the poor sod they left behind to fight the Changing Beast, who managed to defeat the beast by breaking up its soul into the three silver figurines using the once magical sword (now broken, item 5 above).

The three figurines depict the three different shapes the Changing Beast could take on: man, beast, and something alien and otherworldly.

Selling off the three figurines will require some persuasion, since the figurines makes most people uneasy.

My daughter's dungeon

My six year old daughter drew this dungeon a week or so ago, after watching me doing something similar. I think it's a killer dungeon, and I think it shows that she's a great fan of monsters (e.g. she always runs the monsters when we play Castle Ravenloft, and had this to say when she saw an image of Jabba the Hutt: "He looks kind.") And she's apparently a big fan of - plumbing!

Annotated version below the map, with her own descriptions.

Sejten, a dungeon map, with some hooks

Have a vanilla dungeon map I did over the last two days, including the two smaller mountain range pictures showing the area around the lair/dungeon/slightly evil place.

(And my six year old daughter named it. No I don't think she knows who Satan is.)

Adventure hooks, or maybe rather just things I make up as I watch the image above that you may find useful to get your creativity going

1. The bear skin rugs becomes animated for 2d6 minutes whenever someone mentions anything related to either food or weapons
2. The rats are highly intelligent and will sell for huge amount of coins. They understand human speech but can only squeak
3. Each painting holds a piece of a larger map on the backside, marking the birthplace of whoever built this place
4. While sitting on any chair, time passes twice as fast
5. Each rug acts as a time portal if the right word is spoken while standing on it (each rug has it its own word); anyone standing on the rug will travel in time but not in space for 1d6 minutes, and then return to the present:
1. (the past) When the lair was being constructed
2. (the past) One minute ago
3. (the past) When the lair was controlled by a very jolly queen who loved all and everyone
4. (the past) When the lair was controlled by a very gloomy necromancer who hated everyone, but rats most of all
5. (the past) The very moment when the To-Be-High-Lord-Snake-King and its troops invaded the lair (then controlled by a never-to-be-seen-again tribe of very friendly, human-sized rats)
6. (the very far future) Faulty, malfunctioning robots patrolling the halls, trying to shoot laser beams at any intruder (but not succeeding because a future dungeon party nicked all guns just days prior to our time travellers, replacing the guns with regular LED pen lights)
6. The egg is not an egg
   

Four picture prep

 

As I upload these sketches and as I type in the title of this blog post, I start to wonder if you could use only four pictures for all things in session - that is, that's the prep for the night.

The four pictures above would then - for the whole session - all represent:

• The adventuring party
• Random encounters
• Loot
• Plot hooks
• Room descriptions
• NPC personality traits
• etc

For instance, you need to roll for a random encounter. Roll a 1d4 and either just use that picture as is ("You meet a knight in a never before seen armour; the knight waves at you and greet you all with a monotonous "HELLO EARTHLINGS!"), or rip off the various pieces found in the picture ("You find animal horns and hair - lots of hair").

(Now I need to get back to work. Ta-da)

Dungeon dressing using random Swedish books, an ugly map and a couple of WHYs

There are probably hundreds or more slick, fun, useful ways of generating dungeons, and populating them for fast, great use at your table.

This is not one of those, but I'm bored, so here goes.

There's one method we practised at work one time during team building (that we never used again, probably pretty typical for team building workshops) that had you constantly ask "Why ..." five times in a row to a given statement. For instance, you start by describing a simple problem, then you ask "Why is X causing Y" or "Why are we XYZZY?", and you get an answer, and then you reiterate with another "Why are we ...." based on that answer.

This has probably been used in RPG map making before, but I wanted to try it anyway, and I wanted to infuse some strange randomness into it whole by utilising my bookshelf in the process.

But first of all, I need a map. I'm thinking simple since I don't have all night for this post:

So my main idea is this:

1. Pick something from the map above
2. Formulate a question on the form: "Why is X there?"
   
3. Pull out a book at random from the bookshelf
4. Flip to some random page, choose a sentence at random - that's the answer
   
5. State a new question, using answer in 4
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 (maybe occasionally 3, 4 and 5) until there are three or more WHYs and answers regarding that object

 

I'll quote whatever sentence I find, but I'll need to (badly) translate them from Swedish so sorry about that.

 

STATUE IN FIRST ROOM

(book: DIKTER by Karin Boye [1942]) 

Q: Why is there a STATUE in the first room?

A: "Säg mig, dis från Kunskapsbrunnarna" --> "Tell me, haze of Wells of Knowledge" --> Because it grants access to the Wells of Knowledge through a haze

Q: Why would someone need access to the Wells of Knowledge?

A: "Jag läste i tidningen att någon var död, någon som jag kände till namnet"  --> "I read in the newspaper that someone was dead, someone I knew by name" --> Because it can answer questions about deceased people using only their names

Q: Why would someone need answers about deceased people?

A: "ty dagen är du" --> "because the day is you" --> Because it enables someone to be that person for a full day

CLOSED DOORS IN FIRST ROOM

(book: DOKTOR GLAS by Hjalmar Söderberg [1905])

Q: Why are the doors closed?

A: "Jag skulle aldrig ha väntat något sådant av honom" --> "I would never have expected something like that from him" --> Because there is a man that can't be trusted behind the doors

Q: Why can't the man be trusted?

A: "Han var ännu gråare i ansiktet än vanligt" --> "His face was paler than usual" --> Because he is dying

Q: Why is the man dying?

A: "Ljusen brunno med smutsröda lågor mot den grå gryningsdagern" --> "The candles are burning with dirt red flames against the grey dawn" --> Because he performed a ritual involving red candles that affects daylight

Q: Why did he perform that ritual?

A: "Mina sinnen vaknade först sent, vid en tidpunkt, då min vilja redan var en mans vilja" --> "My senses awoke late, at a point, when my will were already that of a man" --> Because he needed to mend his body and mind

Q: Why did he need to mend his body and mind?

A: "Vad var det för folk där?" -> "What kind of people were there?" --> Because his mind was shattered and shared between multiple persons

 

PASSAGE THAT ENDS IN WATERFILLED CAVES

(book: PETTSON FÅR JULBESÖK by Sven Nordqvist [1988])

Q: Why are the caves filled with water?

A: "Gubben gick och la sig." --> "The old man went to bed." --> Because someone fell asleep on the job preventing the caves from flooding

Q: Why did someone fall asleep while preventing the caves from flooding?

A: "Han stönade och jämrade sig medan han kravlade upp ur snön." --> "He moaned and wailed while he crawled up from the snow" --> Because he was buried in snow and started hibernating

Q: Why was he buried in snow?

A: "Han var tvungen att göra sina bästa konster för att de överhuvudtaget skulle titta på honom" --> "He had to perform his best tricks to even get them to notice him" --> Because he tried to cast great illusionary spells to impress some gods

Q: Why did he try to impress some gods?

A: "Men det var en bit att gå" --> "But it was a bit of a walk" --> Because he wanted to reach them but they were out of reach

 

PIT TRAP

(book: SAMLADE DIKTER by Edith Södergran [1949])

Q: Why is there a pit trap in the hallway?

A: "Människor, det häver sig i mitt bröst" --> "People, my chest is rising" --> Because the spikes are growing like plants in this pit

Q: Why are the spikes growing in the pit?

A: "Några sista stjärnor lysa matt" --> "Some last stars shine dull" --> Because they yearn for moonlight

Q: Why are they yearning for moonlight?

A: "Jag sörjer så som hade jag förlorat en sagokrona" --> "I mourn as lost a crown of fairytales had I" --> Because the spikes are lost ornaments to a great fairy crown

* * * *

 

Did this produce the most exciting dungeon ever in existence? Nope, but it got me thinking about things not visible on the map, which got me thinking about the map, and so on.

Using an overly simple map was intentional, and I think - if you for some strange reason decide to try this yourself - one should ask questions about the most mundane things in the map, because that gives the most flavour; I mean, I put a statue or two in there, of course they're going to indicate some special thing, so asking WHYs about them is not that very exciting. But let's say you ask WHYs about an ordinary wall, or the ceiling, or just a door frame - mundane things that NEEDS to be there anyway - what could this method bring forth?

(And my apologies to the authors above for thrashing their penmanship with my horrible translations.)

One Page Dungeon draft I never got around to use

An old map I probably meant to send to the OPD contest but forgot about.

TL;DR: a monster that collects head. One player loses one at the entrance. The monster wears it when they encounter it. Slay it and get it back.

The good folks over at G+ seemed to like it, so why not put it over here as well.

Emoji dungeon

The village that forgot to feed its giant

I'm too lazy to write a proper encounter table, so here's one big rumour list instead. I'm so lazy I didn't even bother to divide it into proper sections. And you still have to decide which rumours are true. I'm so lazy.

Rumours:

1. The Four Pillar Pyramid is really just the tip of the iceberg
2. Jumping into a chasm just makes you reappear ten meters up in the sky, some meters away
3. The tiny village by the lake really forgot to feed its giant; its spirit will awake next full moon and crush those puny beings
4. The sand in the south-western dunes is edible and nutritious, although a bit dry
5. The pillar by the Rim of the World is made of gemstones
6. Entering a giant's skull with your eyes closed leads to the negative version of this world
7. There are two blind octopuses searching for each other in the lake. If they meet they'll mend into the creature that'll devour the world
8. Cursing and waving a dagger is the proper way to greet most villagers
9. The tower by the lake lacks windows because it is inhabited by vampires
10. The lone cross at the end of the mountain path isn't a burial site - it's a meeting place, but not for human beings
11. Most barns in the forest has the rest of the giant's bones. They are said to bring good luck
12. There are six cave entrances that leads to the shallow netherworld, each with its own kind of polymorph spell cast upon entering
13. The Rim of the World is also the Rim of the Universe, and thus the Rim of Reality
14. Every seventh tent belongs to a ghoul. It moves with the nomads but will not harm them as long they offer it human flesh every full moon
15. The blood of the now gone giant is stored in the bark of the trees
16. There's a wise woman meditating on top of one of the Four Pillars
17. Never buy a yellow potion from a dune merchant; it's just camel piss and doesn't grant you immortal life
18. The two skulls belonged to the same giant
19. The Star Tower at the Rim of the World is supposed to be a prison, but nobody's heard from the warder in a while now
20. The dead trees found scattered around the mountains aren't dead, but undead

80s one page dungeon

KEY

Entering a room: roll on room table, and so on:

1. Empty
2. Low on battery Robo-Robo-Rat
3. Self-aware Hercules monitor
4. Waste pool; static leakage from MTV
5. A sad 404-page
6. Horny laser-beams
7. Fear-droids
8. Low-res versions of the players
9. Pocket calculator that talks through its LCD-display
10. Programmable Ray-Guns (bullets are sub-routines)

The Lair of Shub-Muggah

Mr Telecanter offered a challenge the other day: Make a one page dungeon that uses only images and visual devices. No words. No abbreviations.

My attempt at this is below. The biggest challenge for me was to keep the "visual dungeon dressing" (e.g. skulls and bones and stuff laying around) at a minimum, since I wanted to use clear symbols and icons (like ideograms) to give clues to the DM reading the map. One way to solve this I guess is to draw the DM symbols in a different colour.

And yes, drinking from the Muggah cures headaches and tired eyes.

The Giant's Dollhouse

This is/was (hello Time Travelers!) my entry in the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013.

Click here to download the PDF.

If you want to tinker with it, I've uploaded the original SVG file along with the drawing I did to a folder on Google Drive. You can view the folder here.

I'd like to revisit Pöppelman, maybe write something about his family. Or expand the list of petrified people he's used in his dollhouse. But not tonight!