Pearly Prison of the Crocodile Queen

It's not a half bad title. I think.

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!

Photo by Marin Tulard on Unsplash

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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: