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 order, but occasionally, I want to completely break the structure so that there's little pops of unpredictability to keep players on their toes.

So, since this week's map is "a bunch of noodle-y corridors" instead of five discrete rooms, I decided this would be a great opportunity for one such break. In-game, the Rapids are a result of having an endless waterfall draining into several marsh-y areas through a series of hallways. Out-of-game, this area serves to connect several different parts of the dungeon, and so will likely be visited several times. So to keep things interesting, this week's entry is a 5-entry table of random encounters that can happen when the party is traversing the rapids. Maybe the first time they're through here, they crash into a Basalt Detachment and have to fight in the churning waters, while the second time, they need to rescue a friendly lentilmonger from drowning. 

I've also drafted up some environmental effect rules for the rapids, since the rushing water over jagged pumice-stone presents its own set of dangers. This is mostly done to add a bit of realism and variety to the place: you fought the fish-people in the Mistfall, now get ready for round two but try to keep your footing at the same time! However, the rule about randomizing which hallway you go down at junctions also serves to make this an exploration generator and a somewhat unreliable "hub" to connect the different parts of this upper level dungeon. This serves to offer more meaningful navigation choices for the party, and might be an extra danger to fleeing adventurers (or a deadly tool to trap enemies between angry adventurers and crushing rapids).

This entry also rounds off the last of the "environmental" regions of the dungeon. Next week, we'll take a look at the Mill, the first of the ancient Dwarven magi-tech constructs, and then we'll finish out this first over-map with the Deepcrossing, the first Basalt bastion the party will encounter.