Dungeon23 April: Cave of the Unknown
Here are all the pages for my April dungeon. You’ll notice that my effort at crosshatching only lasted a week ;) Overall, I’m happy with the way this went. Especially since my March dungeon never happened and despite the fact we brough COVID back from Belgium at the beginning of the month.
You may regognise this map
I decided to make my own version of the Cave of the Unknown, a dungeon notoriously absent from Gygax’s module B2, Keep on the Borderlands. One of the times I ran that (in the Astral Borderlands campaign that I started with Whitehack and turned into Macchiato Monsters over a couple of years) I had pegged the Cave of the Unknown as ‘The Source’ to some evil power that the clerics at the Temple of Evil Chaos were looking to exhume. The game never went there, so I had no idea of what The Source was. Well, now it is one the portals linking all my #dungeon23 dungeons.
Entrance, orc defenses
I used the B/X monsters tables to randomly decide on the Cave’s factions. I rolled an adventuring party, orcs, and fire salamanders. So the dungeon is inhabitated by a migrating orc tribe (migration was a big theme in this version of the Caves of Chaos) who fell under the spell of a group of experienced, evil adventurers. Using the OSE generator, I rolled a thief, an assassin, an illusionist, a gnome, and a bard, all between 5th and 9th level — it was easy to think of them as a manipulators looking to build an army to take over some settlement where they could retire.
Adventurers caves
Room 16 has magical cake because it’s my birthday. Hey, one finds inspiration where one can.
Abandoned dwarven forge
When looking for ideas I’d also rolled dwarves and vampires on the random tables. So I added a dwarf vampire! This rounded out the dungeon’s backstory: part of it was a religious forge whose master smith had turned away from the dwarven pantheon the worship fire (possibly because of the portal nearby). She was eventually destroyed for that heresy and laid to rest in a crypt but her patron gave her eternal life as a fire-vampire. Now she’s slumbering with her servants while the salamanders who came through the portal are resting inside the forge.
Of course, the new occupants (and the player characters) will soon wake up everyone…
Portal and mushrooms
The final level has the start of the underground river seen at the entrance — which could be a shortcut between the two — the way into the Temple of Evil Chaos from B2, and the obligatory portal with some weird magic rooms.
Notes
Finally, the notes I took at the beginning and later as I was adding rooms, and the random encounters I added today using a depth crawl style procedure.
Random encounters
So I guess a City of Brass or other elemental plane of Fire dungeon would make sense for March. We’ll see what feels fun to do tomorrow. I have been thinking about post-apocalyptic stuff recently, so that might happen instead…