Classic Dungeons and Dragons and Old School Gaming

D&D etc.


"Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of rust: to rituals' footprints ankle-deep in stone."

-Mervyn Peake

"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped."

-Sir Bedevere in Monty Python and the Holy Grail



Sunday, September 20, 2020

One Page Dungeon Contest 2020

I submitted to the One Page Dungeon Contest this year. This was my first entry since 2013 with The Iron Cloud. Like the Iron Cloud, this one is also intended to be used in a "Space Mutant DnD" milieu. In other words there are wizards and there are also robots. 

Though they won't realize it at first, there are three different clocks that the PCs are working against in this adventure. 

The first is the deadly lazer magiks of two dueling wizards who are trapped in a some type of slowed time distortion. There is a tracker for noting how long the lazer magiks have before they meet their intended targets. The tracker  from the one page dungeon is shown below, with five squares marked out for each wizard to indicate that 2 and a half days have passed since the wizards were embroiled in their freaky duel. The starting point for this tracker is not stated in the adventure but since refugees have been appearing "a few days ago" I would start with 2 to 6 days marked off of this tracker. MBV represents the Magi Bon Vai and ATI represents Anthropath The Inhumanist. 

Lethal Lazer Magik Tracker

Another clock or timed element is the impending arrival of squid men dignitaries from the mist worlds.  I leave it entirely up the the Space Mutant DM to determine when this occurs and what the squid men dignitaries look and act like and what they are capable of. I imagine them as something similar in appearance to the aliens in the film Arrival, but they could be anything from cthuloid horrors to foppish dandies in squid form. 

The final clock the PCs may be working against is likely a result of the first encounter. Anyone who gets near the slime will find a bubble of slime break off from the mass of slime and follow them draining their strength until they die at which point the slime assumes their form becoming a slime doppelganger. 



What I enjoy about One Page Dungeons is the opportunity for text and image to combine and interact in ways that are not found in typical published adventures where the standard is map + key text with maybe some illustrations. There are things I would do differently with this one if I did it over but it was fun. 

Here is the pdf:

The Slime of Magi Bon Vai OPDC 2020 - pdf

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