Last week's dungeon had a strange convoluted origin story.
The Name
At one point, I found a random dungeon generator on the web. It produced a map, and for each room had a dungeon dressing (bad smell, puddle, breeze, etc), and possibly a monster, and possibly a treasure. The monsters and treasures were from Basic D&D, and the dungeon dressing just a single phrase.
The best part of the generator is the names it gives to the whole dungeon. I generated a dungeon, called "THE EBON HALL OF MIRRORS", which I thought was pretty cool.
The Place
I was using the info I had on Parsnak's lodge from The Return of the Trolls campaign to set up an AD&D adventure for our Badlands campaign. The forest around the lodge had a lot of empty space and I was looking for some points of interest. I decided, at one point, to put the pre-generated Ebon Hall of Mirrors onto that map, as a possible opportunity for the party to hunt for treasure. It would probably have been a long series of expeditions, since the place had like 80 rooms in it.
The New Dungeon
After awhile, I decided that the pre-generated adventure was not really all that interesting. So, I decided to re-design it from scratch. I changed the name to "The Hall of Black Mirrors" and whipped up a new map of about 20 rooms (being about ideal for a session). Then, it hit me, "hey, what's up with the black mirrors anyway?" I decided to weave together the Parsnak lodge story to the dungeon more closely. Since Parsnak had encountered the White Stag at his lodge, I decided that the Hall of Black Mirrors was the portal location where the Druidic gods had sent the stag to get Parsnak after he helped kill the elf queen under Lake Demurus. Then it seemed natural that the black mirrrors would be the key to getting out of the dungeon. I created the escape sequence and the clues and filled in the rest. The dungeon was sort of a half-way house, the stopping point for gnomes and light elves and the servants of the Neutral gods who wanted to pass from the Spirit World to the Material Earth.
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