Dungeon 23

I saw the original tweet for the Dungeon 23 challenge over the holidays and decided I wanted to try my hand at it. The idea as spelled out by Sean McCoy is to create a megadungeon by writing 1 room of the dungeon every day for 365 days. I have never created a megadungeon before. When I first started designing dungeons in the 1980s they were common for amateur dungeons. My first dungeon, a continuation of the Haunted Keep in the back of the Basic Rules was in the neighborhood of 100 rooms.

I want to do this using the B/X Moldvay rules that I first used when I started playing and I have decided to do something other than a simple megadungeon. I needed a plot. So I picked 2 of the suggested plots from the Basic Rules (pp B51), Destroying an Ancient Evil and Rescuing Prisoners. The initial hook will be the rescue of prisoners but later the players discover that the fate of the prisoners is to be sacrificed to awaken an ancient evil. I do not have everything plotted in advance. I just have some rough ideas. I do not even have a dungeon name yet. But I have an entire year to figure it out.

For the past twenty years, I have been writing all of my adventures digitally. But to stay true to this challenge I am writing it on paper with a pencil. I have a Journal I bought a year ago on a whim which has lined pages, graph paper, and hexagonal paper. It would make a great DM journal except it is perfect bound. So I found it to be useless and tossed it on a shelf. It should work well for this.

I have been at this for a week. First I wrote up a page of adventure background. The adventurers are hired by the Mayor of the village of East Hollow to rescue some locals who have been kidnapped by goblins. This seems outside the everyday habits of the usually cowardly goblins. The trail leads to the Troll Hills. Clues in the goblin lair (or the interrogation of the goblin chief) will lead the adventurers to a nearby hobgoblin lair. The hobgoblins have been intimidating the goblins into capturing humans and trading them for supplies (mainly food). There is also a side quest where the adventurers can discover that an unscrupulous local merchant has been trading supplies to the hobgoblins for coins the goblins have stolen. Eventually, in the hobgoblin lair, they should learn that the hobgoblins are also being manipulated. This time by the forgotten and mysterious race of thouls.

A goblin lair is the first level of the dungeon followed by a hobgoblin lair. Then the megadungeon truly begins with the lair of the thouls.

The Goblin (left) and Hobgoblin Lairs

I have a map of the surrounding area and the village of East Hollow but I have not really developed it beyond what is shown on the map. I guess to be more properly true to an OSR adventure I could have just left out the regional background. But this kind of background was not uncommon in old 1980s adventure modules. I do not have a name for the region yet. But I named a local large town and seat of the local ruler Thetherytwen (23).

The Region