Nine Months in The Sorcerer's Labyrinth

"Gorefest Dungeon" is just what I call whatever I'm running online at the time, but this year, I began designing a multi-level dungeon called The Sorcerer's Labyrinth. The dungeon shares its name with the first level. 

We just finished Session 36. Virtually all of Level 1 and almost half of Level 2, The Undercrypt, has been explored.

The first-level map has changed a lot over the months. Here are some key versions:

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Version 1.0. Session 1, Feb. 10, 2024 

Session 1 was ran impromptu for an open table on the OSR Pick-Up Games Discord server. After calling for players, I generated a map on donjon, but generated the dungeon's content live by rolling on the Dungeon Stocking Table on page 52 of the 1981 edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.

Room 1 was rolled as "Special, Treasure," so I pulled out my trusty ol' "water weird in a fountain with coins" encounter. I blacked out the door in the top left and bottom left of the Enchanted Fountain room, so that strange downward dead-end passage right after the entrance stairs has always had a secret door there.

The area below it, the Statuary was "Special, No Treasure," and I put a bugbear "assassin" in it that hid on the ceiling and waited for players to pass by before pouncing on the back rank. Players were quick to examine all the statues, but never mentioned looking up. It's the second room of a beginner dungeon, so it's a good time to get this kind of procedural conduct out of the way. It's just a normal bugbear surprise roll if players don't say "I look up." It's good to establish how the table handles these common situations like crab spiders crawling on the ceiling.

The area with the sarcophagus on the dais and the burial niches in the walls would later become the Pyramid. I rolled "Monster, Treasure" on the stocking table and then rolled 12 skeletons. Players rolled their own treasure (Type D) live for the last area of the night—and they rolled a stunning, spectacular 11,800 gp total, a Sword +1, a Scroll of Light and Hold Portal, and a Potion of Healing!!!

Before the game, I made one of the skeletons a wight able to cast Darkness. Not knowing how awesome the player's live treasure roll was going to be, I gave it a Staff of Snakes and a healing potion. I called it a Spellwight.

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Version 2.0. Session 2, Feb. 20

Sessions 2-7 used what's now the odd duck of the map versions. That area with the 70'-wide round pit at the top with the floating platforms was going to be a vertical battle map. Still an idea I want to use. The octagonal room in the center was what it is today—a lever/door puzzle—but for some reason I didn't use gate/portcullis doors. Session 3 used map version 2.1, and it had gates.

Players during these early open-table sessions were much more investigative and experimental. They would always try diplomacy first, or to look for a way to circumvent dangerous encounters. Players of the group that formed from the open-table sessions are much more aggressive.

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Version 3.0. Session 8, April 2

Version 3.1

Version 3.9. Session 26, Sept. 24

Version 3 was a real workhorse for the first half of the campaign. I was never happy with that awkward space on the bottom-right (Area 20/23)—never did figure out exactly how I wanted to use it. It was where I debuted my Pitslither monsters: Sarlacc-like maw-pits with lamprey teeth and a tentacle for a tongue. Players never went back after that, so it never did really matter.

Through 26 sessions of play-testing, it was clear what areas were the most popular, and some of those areas needed more room—a lot more room in the case of the Arcane Library (Area 4) and the so-called "Orc Prison" (Area 29).  

I knew I needed more room, so I increased the size of the map from 390' × 390' to 500' × 500' for Version 4.0 . . . 

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Version 4.0. Session 27, Oct. 1

 Version 4.3. Session 36, Dec. 8

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.