I have finished Brognor’s Hall so I am posting this as a place marker for the contents. Brognor’s Hall is an OSR adventure for levels 4-6. In my setting, it is placed in the Stillwater Further Afield Map at location 0917.
A few Notes
This adventure is a fairly common sub-group of the dungeon crawl, the sealed dungeon. According to the backstory, the dungeon has been sealed for several hundred years. The entrance is closed and can only be opened by a ritual.
The focus on the ritual method of entrance gave me a few options on design. I could have decided that a band of humanoids gained entrance through the door or by tunneling in and then turned it into a standard lair crawl. This would allow for a greater latitude with the types of monsters encountered. The other option was to keep it sealed, which is what I went with. There is a group of troglodytes that have entered recently through the cistern and set up camp but otherwise, it is a sealed dungeon.
A dungeon that has been sealed for hundreds of years presents problems for the dungeon designer. Creatures that need to eat regularly are going to starve to death. They just cannot eat each other. That reduced the number of monsters available in my mind to the undead. But it is something I wanted to try to present.
Using Labyrinth Lord of B/X rules this is a very small number of creatures. Endlessly fighting skeletons off is going to get boring. So I stretched it to include low-life creatures like rats, centipedes, and various spider types. I also put in another group of adventurers which is a standard trope and allows for possible reinforcements to the group should they be down a few members.
I still ended up with a lot of undead capable of draining levels. This is very worrisome in B/X D&D as there really is no way for the characters to regain levels. In fact, 3-4 level characters are likely to die quickly if hit repeatedly. For this reason, I had several of the wights' fight with weapons first until they felt truly threatened. As an aside, it is intended that all of the wights are former adventurers killed by Maloch/Brognor over the years.
I forgot to place Nerewin until near the end so I dropped him in the fourth level, presumably killed by skeletons. I could have replaced one of the wights with Nerewin. A freshly raised Nerewin might almost pass for the living and give the players quite a surprise. Of course, a full day would have had to pass since he went missing.
I hope someone finds this useful and runs it for a group of adventurers. I enjoyed writing it.
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