The Wight's Barrow

 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&

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&#

When I started planning my Dungeon 23 journey for the year, I immediately knew that I'd write it for Dungeon Crawl Classics, my favourite iteration of Dungeon Game Where You Go Fight Monsters Underground And Take Their Stuff . This decision was purely self-serving: I love DCC, I run a lot of DCC adventures, and so I wanted to write something that would use DCC, since I'm likely the only person who's ever going to run this. In the past week, however, there's a sudden explosion of interest among 5e players to step back from "Corporate Dungeon Game" and try something else. So as a bonus post this week, I decided to do a quick write-up of why I love DCC so much, in case you or someone you know has been looking at this weird RPG, apparently about bushy-eyed wizards and VW vans in space, and asking "what is this thing?" I'm not saying "everyone should drop 5e and switch to DCC immediately it's better in every way." Rather, I suspect that

Welcome back to the second installment of my Dungeon 23 challenge. Last week, we covered the funnel adventure that serves to trap our doomed adventurers in the Deep. This week, we'll look at the community of Trapped that has sprung up just outside the steps of the False Priory, which can serve as a base of operations for the party as they delve into the dungeon around them and try to find a way home. Since this megadungeon has an element of being trapped within it, I knew early on that I'd want a "home base" sort of place where the party can retreat to and rest between adventures. In fact, I want a few of these peppered around the dungeon, but this is the first. A community of people, trapped in the dungeon the same way that the party is, surviving on scrap and endless lentils grown by the crime druid. Sure. However, it isn't Swords & Sorcery if the party isn't attacked by Minions of the Evil Ruler™ on their first entry to a marketplace, so this is also an

Welcome to the end of the first week of Dungeon23! Last week, I talked about the overall plan for my journey through Dungeon23, so this week, I'm going to jump right into the first dungeon: The False Priory Last week, I mentioned that my vision for Dungeon23 is powered by Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), and we see that manifesting in a few ways here. Most importantly, this first dungeon is written to be a bit of a "funnel" adventure, which is how characters are created in DCC. Rather than showing up to a new game with a pre-made character, DCC gives you four randomly-generated hapless level-0 peasants and thrusts them into adventure. Any that survive level up to 1st level and can become your character for future adventures. Therefore, this dungeon has a few tough monsters and area-damage traps to try and winnow out the peasants a little bit.  I've also tried to include a few "elements" of the base classes—Warrior (piles of weapons and foes in area d.), Thief

Like everyone in the online TTRPG space right now, I'm embarking on the #Dungeon23 challenge. As originally proposed by Sean McCoy , the challenge says to create a megadungeon by plotting one room a day for a whole year, ending with a 365-room monstrosity to inflict on your hapless players. While Sean's advice is to focus on making one room per day without worrying too much about a grand plan, I had some quiet time over the holidays and can't stop the grand plans from coming even if I wanted to. Rather than fight myself, I'm going into this with a bit of a roadmap sketched out: First, as soon as I saw the Dungeon23 challenge, my mind went to "make one  5-room dungeon per week." I rely heavily on the 5-room dungeon format for my drop-in store games - they're a reliable way to get a satisfying adventure crammed into a 3-hour session with people who may or may not have played together before. In brief, the 5-room dungeon format says to make a dungeon with fi