We left off last Behind the Screen with a list of room encounters and details that are cool and interesting but completely unconnected.
This week, I sat down to get it to all make sense.
I did some more rolling on tables to spark ideas (the Tome of Adventure Design by Matthew Finch is a fantastic resource, by the way), and got some funky results:
PC goal: get supplies to and/or retake temple
Monsters are building or creating a powerful weapon
Carrot: Provide needed equipment
Some vertical elements, climbing down to things and high ground advantage: certain points are more defensible because of a higher altitude
Inhabitants abandoned place after a religious or philosophical dispute 100 years ago
Villain’s trying to conceal itself from local authorities as it creates some sort of secret organization
Villain has some sort of control over the physical surroundings
Some ancient, horrific creatures that are best forgotten and hopefully aren’t still there
Execution: there’s a dead body or some other sign that an execution took place
Riddles? Riddles are cool. I'd like to incorporate one.
So I've got a list of weird stuff, and, finally a title: Pearly Prison of the Crocodile Sorceress.
Which is kinda ... I dunno. It's close.
Call it "Pearly Prison of the Crocodile Queen" and now we're talking!
My goals are to figure out why the PCs are here, what's going on inside the dungeon, what factions are doing what, is there some kind of macguffin, and a few other things besides.
And so, after some thinking and massaging and discarding and tweaking, here's what I've got:
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