My Entry for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2012…

… is rather old actually. Last year I got into the mood of creating a dungeon somewhere after the last contest, and created The Mourning Wight of Brakhill.

Well, I noticed that the creation of a One Page Dungeon might be nice, but rather timeconsuming, so I just entered the Wight into the competition. Because really, I could sit down and create something really new, but right now I am working on so many other things it would just not come out right. For me writing OPD is a bit like writing a poem. I might not be the best of poets, but I damn well will try to create something that I can be proud of.

Related articles

• One Page Dungeon Contest 2012 (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
• Multiple Drafts of Maps (towerofthearchmage.blogspot.com)
• Naming the Dungeon from DISCOURSE AND DRAGONS (discourseanddragons.blogspot.com)

One Page Dungeon Contest 2012

Submissions are now open for the OPDC 2012. At least according to the official Facebook account an the website.

End of Submissions is April 30, 0:00 UTC and… actually, just go and read the page. Obviously some people already submitted, which is way faster than last year, when two weeks before deadline there were about two submissions.

Ok, looking forward to see a lot of excellent adventures again!

[One Page Dungeon] Feedback

Now that makes me all warm and fuzzy: someone posted about using my 2010 One Page Dungeon for their game.

And they seemed to like it.

Excellent.

[One Page Dungeon] The Mourning Wight of Brakhill

Adventurers Needed!

Desmond, Baron of Byrkwood, has a proposal for the characters: he spent a large sum for a custom-made set of dwarven weapon and armor for his eldest son, it was supposed to be crafted by the famous artisan Brakr, Master of Brakhill. After the dwarf took the money he did not come back to the Baron in over two years. Not knowing what happened to Brakr (and more importantly: what happened to his new armor?!), he now wants to send out a daring group of adventurers to see what happened. And get his money back.

Why do we always wait for the One Page Dungeon Contest to come around to show off our dungeon creating skills? That’s a bit like a singer who will perform in public only once a year.

Anyway, this is a small dungeon adventure I thought about a few days ago. Back then it was supposed to be an orcish lair. Turns out the topic changed two or three times in between.

SC1_Mourning_Wight_Of_Brakhill (download)

Update: Updated the file for the OPDC2012. Basically I added the Creative Commons license.

[One Page Dungeon] Ancient Ark of the Atlanteans

And here it is, my entry for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2011. I would lie if I was saying it was planned from long hand, I just realized the contest was on a few days ago, and in between I did not even know if I was going to participate. Then I got into thinking about it a bit better.

I wanted to have something different this year. Last year it was a rather simple and too railroady fantasy cave system, this year I wanted to do something more science fiction.

I created this with Traveller in the back of my mind, but a few things were influenced by Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future (see all those radioactive signs?). I even dropped a few cavemen in the middle of it, figuring that it even made a bit of sense considering the backstory.

The problem with the design of dungeons for a science fiction setting is that science fiction is not very dungeon-centric. At least not as much as D&D. Traveller, as the first really successful science fiction rpg, did a few dungeon crawls in the beginning (Annic Nova comes to mind), just to drop it after a while and go for planetary or space adventures.

This one is supposed to be a take on the genre and it’s own version of dungeons as they appear in a few novels: megaconstructions. Think Ringworld, Rama, and all the others. The scales on this one are completely changed as a result of course: where normal dungeons cover a small area of space this one is a whole, hollowed out moon. But then the possibilities of the characters, if they are not actually native to the Ark, are different than those of their fantasy counterparts.

This doesn’t mean they HAVE to have fliers and gravs and zeppelins and spaceships inside the Ark, but they could have. And anyway, I think this one is played best with a wide mixture of techlevels. Personally I would give the white apes at least some gunpowder and the technomads some ballons or zeppelins. One fascinating thing also would be if there still was at least one (mostly) working train line from the highlands up to Serpent City. Then we really could railroad at least part of the plot.

Download Ancient Ark Of The Atlanteans as .pdf (ca. 1mb)