A Life Full of Adventure

Now that summer break is here and my schedule is less hectic, I'd like to start a new weekly post...a round-up, if you will, of different interesting things I have read through the week. I hope you find these enjoyable...and helpful as well. Entertainment What Makes a Great Title for an Adventure?  by Carl Bussler (Article) Great adventures contain devious villains, wondrous locations, horrific monsters and of course, a memorable title. But what makes a great title? Megadungeon Practices by John Arendt (Article) This article is an interesting read in-and-of itself, which discussion of topics like Use a Stocking Algorithm, Gold as Experience, and Pacing Advancement. However, some of the topic summaries lead to other, longer blog posts (Deeper Levels = Greater Danger, Progressive Elaboration, and Flow of Information [an article that I was going to link in this review before he included it in the larger Practices write-up]). I really should have posted this yesterd...

On Thursday Gothridge Manor posted a whole 'last minute game setup' post. What caught my eye was an alternative trap to put on a chest. Tim's idea was, instead of having a needle trap or a fireball trap, to use a teleport trap on the chest. I want use the idea and expand it a bit 1-A thief can use Find/Remove traps to find the trap, but there is a penalty due to the magical instead of mechanical nature of the trap. 2-The opener of the chest gets a saving throw vs spells. If the opener fails, they are teleported to a cell deeper in the dungeon/structure. 3-The spell is a proximity spell, so it is going to effect whoever opens the chest. It doesn't matter which direction the chest is facing, for instance. 4-The opener needs to make a second saving throw vs spells or they will also succumb to a sleep spell. 5-The cell to which they are transported has a permanent Silence spell cast on it.  The imprisoned PC is potentially asleep and is silence and ...

Considering the facts: I don't want my underground complex to be of Dwarven or Skaven make. I want the front door to lead to a heretofore unknown valley. I have some Halfling ideas rolling around in my head. The resulting background is: Many ages ago, the valley was home to Halflings. One family of Halflings began dabbling in magic and eventually moved up to a tall hill overlooking the valley where they could practice their art without endangering, and with less interruption from, others. The power of this family grew until it was summoning demons to do its manual labor, including excavation and artisan work in the hill complex. The complex will be like a Hobbit hole but with expansions. One expansion is the family crypt, a sublevel of the complex. Occasionally, the family would allow a particularly prominent (and giving) Halfling from the valley to be buried within. The ages saw the decline of the population in the valley, the loss of its connections to the res...

I admitted when I posted these ideas that they were old. While it's true that "old" doesn't necessarily mean "inferior," there are some points I would like to update or alter due to my current mindset. Here are some updates I've been thinking about: In a dark part of the cave complex, they find a door that leads to a finished underground hold. I need to find out what creatures used to live in this hold. The hold isn't populated now. The hold is/ was not a dwarven complex. It's not Skaven. I need to find another underground creature that might have made and live in an actual underground keep. I've already updated the entrance to be a sinkhole that leads into a large hall . I like this idea so much that I'm making the hall larger and larger in my head to accommodate a day or so worth of investigating just for the one room.  Now the complex is filled with undead.  The undead are not human, they are undead of whatever creature used to l...

Last Tuesday I asked, "Where did that entrance come from?" I had a few ideas, but I received a few others from Google+. The one that really caught my attention was a sinkhole. Let's imagine that the picture above has a sinkhole coming in from the ceiling right about where that chandelier is. This is the starting point for a dungeon I'm (very) slowly going to create. Opening: A sinkhole has collapsed into and underground hall. Nobody locally, even historians, knows about any kind of worked complex in this area. Work is currently being done to try to stabilize the sinkhole, while adventurous types are being recruited for an interior investigation.  This is a pretty easy way to get the characters pulled in to the adventure. Another idea is that if the PCs don't take up the challenge of exploring the underground find, they will occasionally hear reports about what's going on down there when they are off on their other adventures. At some point the reports ...