Dyson's Delve - Level 10

Twas the morning before christmas, and all through the house, everyone was wondering why Dyson was posting yet another level of this mini mega dungeon. (hint: it might have something to do with an obsessive personality)

This level is unusual in that it is broken up into three distinct areas. One can only be reached from level 9, one from level 11, and the last is the route used to get from level 9 to level 11.

This level of the dungeon finally brings in the big bad of the whole dungeon, but he can only be reached after the party has been to level 11.

The big bad guy? It wouldn’t be Dungeons & Dragons if there wasn’t a dragon somewhere in the dungeon.

You can download the fully stocked One Page Dungeon PDF of the level here.

Or you can click on the image below to download the high resolution map of the dungeon level.

Dyson's Delve - Level 10

Dyson's Delve - Level 11

Level 11 completes Dyson’s Delve, my mini mega dungeon project. All in time for New Years Eve. This level leaves the entire adventure open to expansion at the whim of the DM – the final location is a massive underground sea upon which many adventures can be held once the dungeon is cleared.

This level brings back the troglodytes we met back on the temple level – the same troglodytes who serve the dragon living on level 10, and guarding the way to his lair. There are a few other creatures on the level as well, and of course the mandatory tentacular beasts living within the lake, ready to eat unwary adventurers.

You can download the fully stocked One Page Dungeon PDF of the level here.

Or you can click on the image below to get the high resolution scan of the map alone.

Dyson's Delve - Level 11

Today I’m hustling to get my One Page Dungeon together for this year’s One Page Dungeon Contest, so instead of posting something new, I’ll pimp the contest and get back to my dungeon.

This is the third year of the One Page Dungeon contest. The rules are simple, and everyone benefits. Not only are there a butt-load of prizes, your dungeon goes into a collection of such dungeons that is widely distributed for free so many others will have the opportunity to check out your work.

• Participants create a One Page Dungeon.
• Submitting a dungeon to the contest releases it under the Creative Common Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license with credit to the contest participant.
• The submission must have a name, an author, a map, a key, a link to the license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) and no game stats.
• A link to your blog, wandering monsters, random events, adventure background or introduction, and descriptions of tricks or traps are all optional.
• One entry per participant. Participants may revise/replace their entries up until the end of contest, with the last revision counting as their official entry.
• Submission must be mailed in PDF, Open Office, or Microsoft Word format to Alex Schröder → kensanata@gmail.com.

So yeah, my map is done, just need to scan it and stock it. I’ll post it to the blog when I submit it to the contest.

And you should get one together today too.

I’ll confess, I haven’t scanned a map in about a month. I’ve been working from a backlog of scans I made and posting them (including the upcoming Friday map).

After the big crash which killed my hard drive and my backup drive, my windows system would not recognize my scanner. It recognized it before, but somewhere in the windows reinstall the thing got borked. And it remains borked. So I have to boot into Linux to scan, and I’m inherently lazy, so rarely do so.

Turns out that my scanner is screwing up now too.

This is the best scan I managed of the map for the One Page Dungeon contest – if this were a scan of one of my pencil maps I’d be happy with it, but I’ve never had one of my inked maps come out this rough, or as inconsistent in shade and texture. I’m really pretty bummed about this as it may end up requiring that I pick up a new scanner to get back into the swing of things.

The Worm's Gullet

I was originally going to post the whole one page dungeon today, but I’ve spent the last three hours tweaking with the scanner and software and am just burned out.

And I have to get some real work done for that person who pays my bills.

Scanning Hell be damned, my entry for the 2011 One Page Dungeon contest has been sent off.

Into the Worm’s Gullet is a short no-stats adventure designed for a party of level 4-5 characters. Enemies include shadows (of dwarven acolytes), rock living statues (shaped like dwarves), an insane dwarf who is treated as a living statue in game terms, and a collection of apes and baboons – with a few fungi thrown in for good measure.

You can download the PDF here, or you can read it by clicking on the more link below the graphic.

Into the Worm's Gullet - Keyed Map

In ages long past, a great worm erupted from the mountain face in a dire frenzy, only to be struck to stone almost immediately by it’s poor choice of meals – a young cockatrice. The local dwarves celebrated the demise of both the cockatrice and the worm and expanded the intestines of the worm into a homestead for the small dwarven clan in question.

But even that was ages ago and the worm fortress has been forgotten far from any useful veins of ore or trade caravans. Now adventurers are drawn here in search of the Heart of Dur, a magical ruby that is said to have been swallowed by a great wyrm. Only recently has a sage determined that this may actually be a reference to it being protected within the gullet of the petrified worm.

Wandering Monsters (1 in 6, check every 2 turns, d4 for type)

1. 1d3 Living Statues, Rock (can occur twice, ignore if rolled again)
2. 1d12 Rock Baboons
3. 1 Gray Ooze escaped from room 5 (can only occur once, ignore if rolled again)
4. 1d8 Dwarven Acolyte Shadows (can occur twice, ignore if rolled again)

1. The Mountain Face – a score of rock baboons have set up their nest around the worm’s mouth on the cliff face and the ground leading up to the mouth, although there are many more living in the area. They fight to protect their territory and grudgingly allow the apes in area 2 access in and out. They will continue to pester adventurers throughout their explorations, with scouting groups entering the worm’s gullet after them (via the wandering monsters).

2. The Maw – 5 white apes live here and venture forth at night for food.

3. The Twist – a smooth wall with a door has been carved here where the worm’s body twists downward into the mountain face. Mosaics on this landing are colourful and garish and magically confuse viewers, making those who fail their save to travel back towards the entrance instead of deeper into the worm.

4. Statuary – 2 rock living statues stand guard over the mangled and burned bodies of a pair of white apes. They will not attack the umber dwarf not his acolytes. The room to the south has a secret trap door to the tail of the worm. This door is not locked currently, but can be locked simply by opening and closing it again. Paintings on the walls indicate that this was once a bedroom for young dwarves.

5. Fungus – this moist room has been completely given over to fungal growth. 4 shriekers and a gray ooze are here along with the other harmless mushrooms and slime molds. Buried in the slime is a small coffer containing 4,000 ep protected by a poison needle trap.

6. Chamber of the Acolytes – once a small dwarven forge complete with hammer and anvil, now home to 4 dwarven acolyte shadows of the umber dwarf. If the anvil is struck by a hammer, it rings out a pure note and grants the hammer an additional +1 bonus to hit and damage beyond any bonuses the hammer may currently have. This effect lasts for 1 hour.

7. The Umber Hall – The Umber Dwarf (an insane dwarf now made mostly of stone) resides here along with four captive white apes. Treat the umber dwarf as a rock living statue with a faster movement rate and more intelligence. If he can, he`ll try to escape deeper into the bowels of the worm and then use the secret door into area 4 (locking it behind him) in order to escape. Regardless, he won`t help the adventurers to recover the heart in area X. The stone door to the stairs to areas 9 – 11 is locked and jammed. Treat the unlocking mechanism as a secret door for detection purposes.

8. Retreat – once a chapel to a dwarven god, this room is used by the umber dwarf in prayer and contemplation. Among the implements of worship is a scroll of bless, resist fire, cure disease and cure serious wounds. Anyone defiling this space (and any elves or orcs entering it) must make a saving throw or be cursed – reducing their prime requisite by half until the curse is removed.

9. Alcoves – each of the four alcoves in this hall (three of which contain doors) contains a glowing orange mist. Living things entering this mist must make a saving throw. A successful save increases Constitution by 2 for an hour, while a failed save reduces it by 2 for the same duration.

10. Statuary Redux – 3 rock living statues (in the form of dwarves) are arranged in a triangle in this room, around a large glowing ruby. The massive 1,000 gp ruby is incredibly hot via some unknown magic, dealing 1d6+1 damage per round to anyone touching it, although that is its only power.

11. The Heart of the Worm – a single pedestal in the middle of the room holds the Heart of Dur. The pedestal is actually an earth elemental bound to protect the ruby who will fight to the death to keep it here in the deepest part of the worm`s gullet.

The Worm's Gullet

The winners have been announced for the 2011 One Page Dungeon Contest. And I am among the fifteen winners for my old-school crawl “Into the Worm’s Gullet”.

You can read about my dungeon entry here.

You can see the rest of the winners and download a PDF of all the winning entries here. This is an awesome collection of 15 one page dungeons who are all more worthy of winning than I was. Personally, I think the judges were smoking something to put the Worm’s Gullet in there with the rest of these.

That said, I think it may be time to change the tagline of the site… “Award Winning Dungeon Design” has a nice ring to it.

The Worm's Gullet

The webmaster of Ancient Scroll has translated my One Page Dungeon “Into The Worm’s Gullet” into Polish – where Google Translate tells me it is now called “By Esophagus Brood”.

That is a much cooler name than “Into the Worm’s Gullet”. I think I may have to make a new adventure just because of the title. Maybe do it as “Return to the Worm’s Gullet: By Esophagus Brood“. It needs lots of creepy blind worms crawling out of the guts of the dungeon as somehow without the Heart, the worm is slowly coming back to life (or is becoming undead?) and is spontaneously generating this brood of horrible flesh-eating worms.

The opening scene is of course finding the remnants of the Rock Baboon camp at the entrance to the dungeon, with most of the baboons dead, and the leader now horrible and corrupt, a twisted mockery of a baboon riddled with flesh-eating worms that crawl from his mouth, eye sockets and everywhere else as he attacks the party.

Wow, this is so much cooler than my original.

Screw living statues and ancient dwarves, it’s time to eat the worm baby, before the worm eats you!

(And on that note, suddenly I think I should add a Tequila-based drinking game to the adventure also)

Outpost CVIII

Then we head over to Chaotic/GM’s blog to check out his Outpost CVIII, an adventure for Savage Worlds: Necropolis.

The map for Outpost CVIII? None other than the Monastery of Electrum Flowers that I posted on Friday (quick turnaround!), remixed into a sturdy concrete military outpost with the basement stairs instead leading up into a communications tower. Shades of the classic Aliens movie live in this adventure, side-by-side with many zombies, of course.

I love seeing what my maps inspire. In this case, it is far cooler than the monastery as I used it in my Labyrinth Lord / AEC game where I had it overrun with demons, tainted monks doing crazy ninja-stuff with polearms, and an insane berzerker dwarf.

I may draw cool maps, but there’s a lot more awesome out there than how I use them.

Last week I posted a call on Twitter and then on the RPGBA boards for people who like my maps to send me a map they would like to see Dysonized. I obviously over-estimated how much people like my maps, as I only got some sent my way after I threatened to start going through people’s blogs and Dysonizing their maps without their permission. Yeah, they love me. In the end the first map that I started working on is one that I almost find sacrilegious to remake in this fashion… Jensan over at Rustfoot designed a great dungeon for the 2011 One Page Dungeon competition in a style that I absolutely love – the map is made of words describing what is being mapped.

The upside of this is that I have a fair amount of freedom to translate that map into a more traditional dungeon map.

Here’s the original: “There’s a Sword Down There, I Promise” post – I recommend following the link to the Interactive Map which rocks. The map is awesome. And here’s that same map, Dysonized! If you have both in hand then you have a traditional dungeon map here and a key for it in the original version. Oh, and my version has a mistake – the pit trap in the long hallway is missing. But that’s what you get with an extreme makeover, some stuff changes! (ok, ok, I didn’t change it on purpose, I plain forgot)

And mostly unrelated, this is turning into some sort of Map Week – this is the fifth map post in a row!

There's a Sword Down There, I Promise!

That’s right, we’re approaching the deadline for the 2013 One Page Dungeon Contest. I’ve entered the contest twice in the past, getting an honourable mention and a win with my two entries:

• The Tomb of Durahn Oakenshield (2009)
• Into the Worm’s Gullet (2011)

Since I seem to enter every second year, I figure it’s time to start working on my entry for this year. Back in the rush after winning with Into The Worm’s Gullet I double-translated the name of the adventure through Google and got a much cooler name that I’ll be using for this year’s entry: “By Esophagus Brood”.

That’s right, we’re going back to the Worm’s Gullet for a second adventure – with a new map, new challenges and a new story taking place two years after the adventurers claimed the Heart of Dur from within the worm.

You can learn more about the One Page Dungeon Contest (and the phat lewt you can receive for entering) at the 1PDC g+ page, and at the official website (I linked to the g+ page too because the website seems to have been having a few issues lately)

By Esophagus Brood

My entry for the One Page Dungeon Contest is away! Click on the picture above to download the PDF version. Since this is for the 1PD contest, it is system neutral, but I’ll get rid of that neutrality here on the blog. Over the next week or two I’ll post up critter stats for the main creatures using a variety of systems… well, I promise I’ll have the Labyrinth Lord statting done, hopefully I’ll find the time to make the minor edits for S&W and a rewrite for DCC.

Goblin Gully is in the top 3 best known adventures from this site. I think the order goes something like:

1. Dyson’s Delve
2. Challenge of the Frog Idol
3. Goblin Gully

I originally released Goblin Gully to the world in 2009, and have used it in one variation or another in 4 different campaigns and a pair of one-shots over the last decade. Yet, for some reason I didn’t include it in Dyson’s Delves. So I’ve fixed that for Dyson’s Delves II. The adventures included in Dyson’s Delves II are:

• Valley of the Red Apes
  • Ziggurat of Rhissel the Morning Lord
  • a Devourer Most Foul
  • The Secret of Jen’s Hall
• Goblin Gully
• The Screams from Jedder’s Hole
• The Trouble at Imp Brücke
• The Ruins of Corvel on the Mount
• Cavanaugh’s Hall
• Atarin’s Delve

I’m currently putting the final touches on Valley of the Red Apes and playtesting a few encounters for said adventure set before I send the book off to the printer for my first print test.

But since Goblin Gully was such an old map, I decided to try redrawing it while I was updating the text to include monster stats (as a one-page dungeon, I originally omitted monster stats so it could be run system-neutral). I also scored a great piece of art for it from Andrew Shields of Fictive Fantasies to go with it. Heck, maybe after I release Dyson’s Delves II I’ll actually re-release Goblin Gully on it’s own.

Goblin Gully, Redrawn

Within a day or two of finishing the redraw and putting it in the book, I got a message from Guillaume Rondon that he had put together a French translation of Goblin Gully – so I threw the new version of the map over to him so the French edition would be the first public release of the new facelift of Goblin Gully.

You can check out “La Ravine des Gobelins” right here! (PDF link)

(And as a footnote, with Dyson’s Delve in Dyson’s Delves I and Goblin Gully in Dyson’s Delves II, I guess I’ll have to give Challenge of the Frog Idol a makeover for Dyson’s Delves III, eh?)

I love it when people do stuff with my maps. In this case, we have a pair of One Page Dungeons written for the Pathfinder system using two of my maps – one very recent and one from the archives of the site.

• The Mines of Kazak-Kuln
• The Tomb of the Sorcerer King

Written by Tim King for the Pathfinder RPG, the lack of stats required for the One Page Dungeon format means that these are really easily used in any fantasy RPG as long as you are willing to find an approximation for an “Orc Boss” or a “+1 Undead Bane Weapon”. In other words, easy as pie to use in any fantasy RPG.

Tim King is at it again. Last month he gave us two one page dungeons using maps recently posted to the blog. Today I present his latest creation, the Lair of the Serpent Lord, using my most recent isometric map.

Lair of the Serpent Lord (Click for PDF)

So yeah, just click that graphic to download the PDF.

This is also a reminder of how slow I am to post awesome stuff here sometimes. Tim sent me this in email exactly a month ago today. I’m slower than molasses in a Canadian winter. So thanks, Tim, this is awesome!

The Village of Brenton’s Bend

I originally drew the map of Brenton’s Bend as a mini-mapping challenge. I purposefully split an already small notebook page in half and drew two maps on the resulting areas. Well, Vance over at Leicester’s Ramble has taken then mini-challenge a step further and made a one page adventure out of it.

Then he made a second one page adventure out of it. And a third. And a FOURTH.

Seriously, a pair of mini maps, and four different fleshed out ways to use it.

So yeah, stop reading this post and head over to Leicester’s Ramble and check out the four one-page villages waiting for you!

There’s only 10 days left to get your adventure together for the 2015 One Page Dungeon Contest. I’ve been a winner and a runner up in past years, but this year instead of entering into the contest I’m offering prize support.

There are print copies of Dyson’s Delves I & II up in the prize pool, and you know you want them. Well, not to mention the $500 grand prize, a gorgeous copy of the classic TSR Boot Hill RPG, and a bunch of other RPG products and smaller cash prizes.

Also, if you really need a bit of inspiration, you can go over to my Commercial Maps page and see if any of the seven maps there give you an itch to write up a one-page-dungeon with them. While you can’t use the other maps on the blog (because the contest requires that you release your dungeon under the Creative Commons license), those seven maps are available for any use, including this contest (and you can remix, mashup, chop, mangle, fold, spindle, and mutilate the maps as much as you like to make them work for your entry).

So stop staring at the screen, get creating and enter into the contest! There’s cool shit to be won, and you are also providing a great resource for DMs who use the One Page Dungeon Contest releases every year for their adventure ideas.