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Dungeon 23 Week 9 - Cliffbarrows

 Welcome back to another week of Dungeon 23! This week is the first entry in a brand-new region of the dungeon, a sublevel of level 1 dominated by Fune and the Basalt Warriors. Last week we looked at Deepcrossing, the fortress Fune has for safeguarding the only entrance into this area. This week, we look at the cliffbarrows, the first stop on the long switchback leading down to the basalt flats below. More than anything we've seen so far, my goal for this place is to signal to the party that they are somewhere different now. They travel through the long corridors of the Deepcrossing, feel themselves descending into the earth, and suddenly come to this wide open basalt space. As they descend the ramps to the flats below (which will be more detailed next week), they are immediately set upon by boulders thrown from the cliffs above! Here, hidden in the cliffs, are horrible mixtures of human and basalt, failed experiments from Fune's prisons. They are hostile, and survive by taking
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Dungeon 23 Week 8 - Deepcrossing

 Welcome to Week 8 of my Dungeon 23 challenge! This week is the final map of this first chunk of 8 dungeons, and brings our brave (or hapless) adventurers into direct conflict with a seat of Basalt Power for the first time: The Deepcrossing. The Deepcrossing itself is meant to serve as an obvious transition point between the Marketlands (where we have currently been exploring) and the Basalt Flats, where Fune and its army of elementals and conjurers holds dominion. Both in-game and out of game, this is signified by the first room on the map. Sticking your head in shows a bunch of banners that literally say "Fune was here" and shoots some big crossbow bolts at the party. But, note that the alarm isn't sounded unless the party sticks around. This way, should the party stumble into this place at low level, they can flee if they want and not provoke any response. The timing on the alarms, and the programmed nature of the Basalt Walkers, also provides an interesting non-violen
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Dungeon 23 Week 7 - The Mill

 Welcome back to week 7 of my Dungeon 23 challenge! This week, we get the first real look at the "second" storyline to this megadungeon, the ancient Dwarvish expedition into the realm that the Priory has been built into (or has itself created around it...), as represented by a strange brass mill: Last week, the pumice rapids broke the 5-room dungeon format we've been following to instead present an area with 5 different random encounters that could be experienced by the party when they traverse and re-traverse the area. This week, the Mill also breaks the format a little: we once again return to five "rooms" of entrance, puzzle, red herring, climax, and payoff, but this time, they're all in the same physical room. I've done this for two reasons. First, for fictional cohesion, I wanted there to be a Dwarven mill somewhere in the dungeon, but it didn't really make sense for a steam engine powering a grind wheel to be this gargantuan 5-room complex. Sec
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Dungeon 23 Week 6 - Pumice Rapids

Welcome back, for week 6 of the Dungeon23 challenge, where I'm writing a new 5-room dungeon every week that will interconnect into a massive, multi-level adventure machine in the forgotten depths of the world (we hope!). Well, that's a bit of a lie, since this week is the first entry where we completely break with the 5-room dungeon format, and instead go with a "5-thing table" entry for the Pumice Rapids: Why the format break? As I alluded last week, one of my goals with this project is to make a series of connected 5-room dungeons without them feeling like a series of connected 5-room dungeons. I want attentive players to be able to sense that they've moved from one "zone" to another, but not necessarily to peg "okay we just crossed into a new dungeon, get ready for a Guardian-type room!" Most of this will be achieved by having the sub-dungeons connected in multiple ways, so you don't always progress through each of the five rooms in ord
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Dungeon 23 week 5 - Mallow Grove

Against all my expectations, here we are, over a month since the start of Dungeon 23, and I'm still having a blast making these interconnected five-room dungeons. This week, it's the Mallow Grove.    I'm not sure where the idea for this place came from - some combination of Morrowind, Naussica of the Valley of the Wind, the Magic Schoolbus, an insatiable sweet tooth, and living near the birthplace of Fluff spread? But when I was coming up with a list of locations for this dungeon, I knew I wanted a weird marshmallow swamp. I'm picturing fifteen-foot mushrooms topped with a giant "jet-puffed" head, pools of liquified white goop draped over cattail-like logs, smaller "hot-cocoa" brown patches with white nubby fruiting bodies, and all the while a sticky-sweet smell on the air. And of course, sticky marshmallow oozes to ruin an adventuring party's day! I also wanted to introduce a bit more agriculture into this upper dungeon level, since there are at
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Dungeon 23 Week 4 - The Glistermarsh

 Welcome back to my Dungeon23 challenge, where I'm making a megadungeon for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, one five-room dungeon at a time. Last week, we introduced where the water that sustains this part of the dungeon comes from, so this week, we're pivoting to what happens when that water meets the underground and alien environments of the Old Priory dungeon halls: a big, bioluminescent marsh! As I think I've alluded to in the past, when I'm designing this dungeon, I have a sort of "main story" in mind for each section. In this part of the dungeon, it's the conflict between the Lost (the inhabitants of Nowhere Market, detailed in Week 2) and Fune's Basalt Tower (which will come up in weeks 10-13). This wetlands section (the Mistfall last week, and the next few weeks centered around different things that happen when a bunch of water gets dumped in a dungeon) is more "side quest" or verisimilitude in intent, but that doesn't mean I can&
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Dungeon 23 week 3 - Mistfall

Welcome back to week 3 of the Dungeon23 challenge. This week, we have a look at the area to the north of the False Priory, where we answer the question "wait there's a whole town living in this dungeon? Where do they get their water?" From a giant, mysterious waterfall of course! When I first thought up this level of the dungeon, I knew that I wanted to have a fair bit of it be marshy, fungus-filled terrain (for aesthetics), and that I wanted part of it to center around a mysterious ancient magi-tech mill (see Week 6, when we get there). Both of these would require a source of running water somewhere in the dungeon to permeate a bunch of the place, so I decided early on that there would need to be a waterfall somewhere in there. What we have here is a pretty standard water-dungeon set of encounters, for two reasons. The first is purely practical - that this week has been pretty rough for non-RPG reasons, so I didn't have as much time to dedicate to this project as I&#
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