Shadowmist Vale: Cave of Grundar the Terrible

Up late working on Grundar's Cave, what's currently the 11th adventure in my grim-dark fantasy campaign, Shadowmist Vale. It's a third-level dungeon with some bugbears and goblins, a troll, and, of course, the titular hill giant.

Grundar the Terrible, in my imagination, looks like a bearded, 12'-tall Lobo from DC comics. He wields the wicked Greataxe +2, Ochiron's Demise. Its black blade casts Continual Darkness on hit, turning its victim's eyes into pools of blackness and blinding them. It can only be recharged by killing a friend or family member. 

In another cave in another hex, there's a related hill giant, nicknamed Grunt, who's blinded and scarred from a stroke of his evil brother's greataxe. PCs who cast Continual Light on his eyes, curing him, could gain a powerful ally.

A sulfurous miasma hangs about the cavern like an ochre haze. Hot Springs bubble and steam. The opaque greenish water is scorching hot, but it’s not boiling. Air bubbles rise from below.

Careful! There are water weirds swimming in them!

Creature Catalogue p. 79

In Room 3, there's Vorkha the orc Thief who's stolen Gauntlets of Ogre Power and a Sword +1 from Room 11, the giant's treasury. She's soaking wet, having swam from the pit in Room 7, where her two accomplices, the gargoyles Crong and Razaad, are too afraid to follow her through the secret escape route. They can't gather the courage to swim underwater or to sneak past the bugbear guards on the precipice in Room 6. So, they sit locked in terrified indecisiveness.

Shadowmist Vale

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Other than the Undercrypt, the dungeon in the center of the wilderness map, I haven't talked much about Shadowmist Vale on my blog. I currently plan for my first release to be titled Shadowmist Vale: The Road to Ebonshire. The mini-campaign will feature at least 15 adventure locations for players to "explore or ignore," as a friend says. Some of the locations are sizable dungeons; others are small spots. Ebonshire is a free city-state in the 6-mile hex flower. Though it is self-governing, it stands in the long shadow cast by castle Black Gate Castle, abode of the fearsome and shadowy Lord Gulthor.

I've moved and re-named the locations on the map so many times, and some of them are placeholders, but here's the map as it is currently:

A hex flower of 6-mile hexes

Grundar's Cave yawns open in the foothills of hex 17.04, just north of what I'm calling the Dark Forest for now. It's a placeholder name, like a lot of them. 

There's nothing I like about my map. It's just for my planning purposes. The finished map, I expect, will share some similarities with the GM's Map for the Barony of Twolakes Vale from CM2 Death’s Ride.

What is 'The Undercrypt?'

There are a number of reasons why I'm running an open-table Stonehell campaign right now.

Stonehell is dead simple to run. I want to meet new people and game during the summer, but I won't have a whole lot of time for RPGs—nothing like I do in the winter. Running Stonehell with B/X requires essentially zero prep work. As close to it as it's going to get.

Stonehell is highly popular among the OSR—I knew it would (eventually) draw plenty of players to an open table. Since I don't have an OSR gaming group, I'm throwing a wide net. The more the merrier!

As I've said before, I took more than a year off from game-mastering to play in OSR games. Now I want to get back into running games. At the same time, I've always wanted to both game-master a published module and an open table, neither of which have I done before.

Running an open-table Stonehell campaign with B/X checks all those boxes!

The last reason I'm running Stonehell is because it will be an inspirational experience for the town-and-dungeon adventure module I'm writing, The Undercrypt. It's basically "Stonehell, plus a town, plus a hexmap," much like Keep on the Borderlands and The Village of Hommlet. Barrowmaze is probably similar on paper, from what I've read—but at 260 pages, it's way bigger than my plans.

The Undercrypt is a multi-level dungeon. It's the underground tombs and catacombs beneath an ancient, sprawling cemetery. It's set up just like Stonehell—four 30' × 30' quadrants to a level. Four pages to a quadrant: two pages to set it up, one page for the dungeon map and tables and one page for the key. Four levels is 64 pages.

The hexmap is of the necropolis the Undercrypt lies beneath. It's really big. It has a pond, a garden, a cedar grove; slough; a hedge maze; a statuary; a public columbarium; pool and fountain; hundreds of mausoleums, obelisks and cenotaphs; multiple different grave yards with thousands of tombstones and markers; a ruined cathedral . . . all sorts of stuff. I don't know how big the hexes will be, but certainly not six miles. Perhaps 60 feet.

Town (actually a manor) carters to travelers passing through to bury their dead. People from all over bring their dead to the necropolis. There's a legendary hero-saint buried in the Undercrypt. As long as he rests there in peace, no undead will rise.

There is no one "scripted" event that threatens his rest, but players have the opportunity—for example, if they rob his sarcophagus. It's on level 1. It's not particularly challenging to reach and isn't specifically guarded. He's interred with his sword +3, plate armor +2, and shield +1. Oh, and magic rings. And a medallion with artifact-level power. None of it is said to be cursed—unless you count the fact that if stolen the whole place will descend into infernal hell.

Bandits stalk through the wilderness near every road waiting for a pomp funerary procession to bushwhack. Grave robbers perch among the tombstones waiting like vultures. There's an invasion force of pig-faced orcs pouring through a portal deep within the caverns below the Undercrypt. The black banners of an infamously-ruthless mercenary company fly above the tents of a camp not far from town. Cultists and necromancers—not all of whom wear black hooded robes and wield kris daggers—seek to usurp the Undercrypt's arcane and esoteric secrets.

The hero-saint's militant order guards the necropolis, but their number are few and thin—especially with the goblin war raging on the borderlands. No one is allowed to enter the necropolis without permission—and that's only given for funeral services. The punishment for trespassing is harsh. The punishment for grave robbing or tomb raiding is death.