He's building a dungeon!

An amazing development of the campaign structure.   Marlon's warlock-summoner is building a secret lair.  It started as a hidden chamber underground to hide his evil cauldron and unholy water font.  However, he's been adding secret tunnels, extra chambers and evil plans to stock it with goblins to do the digging.  It grew organically from his desire to hide his chaotic trappings from the prying eyes of the church and from his desire to get XP from spending cash on his home.  However, what it really is is an honest to goodness dungeon.  One might wonder where dungeons come from, and here, without prompting, one has come into existence.

Portchester News

I won't be putting out a Portchester News this cycle, since we are stopped in mid-travel this time and did not advance to a new month.

Secret Doors

While, I both philosophically and practically appreciate the old school processes of wandering monsters, one thing that I'm getting disenchanted with are secret doors.  The players ending up missing some interesting stuff by not finding secret doors.  My effort gets wasted, they miss out on treasure (since I end up putting hidden treasures in secret rooms more often than not).   It doesn't help that the players don't have any elves who have a chance of sensing them even if they aren't looking.  I also don't really want to have the players spending hours searching every stretch of hallway.   Concealed doors are better, players are more likely to try to check behind pieces of furniture or piles of lumber etc.   They risk finding traps or monsters, but more of the concealed rooms are found.  I think I'm going to drastically limit secret doors to places where the players might have some clue or hint that something is missing or a way out is necessary.

Secret Origins of The Hall of Black Mirrors

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.