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Pearly Prison of the Crocodile Queen

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Behind the Screen

Pearly Prison of the Crocodile Queen

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

Maximilian Hart
Oct 24, 2022
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Pearly Prison of the Crocodile Queen

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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!

white egg on brown and black surface
Photo by Marin Tulard on Unsplash

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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