The Wight's Barrow

 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

 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

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

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