One Page Dungeon Contest - My Attempt: Abandoned Prison for the Mystically Insane

Yay! I finally finished my entry for the 2011 One Page Dungeon Contest!

Download my One Page Dungeon Contest Entry Here! Click!!

This was my first attempt at doing something like this.  You can see the map over there to the right.  I tried to make it pretty big, but ended up shrinking the size down to fit the smallish one page format.

The idea for the dungeon was a seemingly normal set of caves, set in a small hill, but within the cave, secret passage lead to a heavily fortified prison, encased in rune-inscribed Iron, which is used to hold some of the worst mystical criminals in the kingdom.  Something about crazy, serial killer, Hannibal-inspired Wizards gives me a very pleasant chill.  It sounds like a really creepy place to make a side-trip on an adventure.

I went a bit old-school with the creation of the dungeon itself.  I've been really enjoying all the OSR PDF's and free content out there for old-school games lately, especially all the wonderful random tables.  I used two random encounter / wandering monster tables in the Dungeon.  One of them is used for the upper levels, where various people/creatures from the area around have come to use the caverns for their own purposes.  The lower, secret levels, are swarming with zombies, mad wizards, starving vampires, and other fowl creatures of darkness, magic, and insanity.  I did my best on it, but I admit, it's really hard to get all that info onto one page.  My eyes may have been too big for my word processor on this one.  Regardless, It was a hell of a lot of fun to put together and I hope you enjoy my entry!

Classic Traveler - Using Subsector Creation rules for...

So… did you think I was done talking about Classic Traveller??? Huh??? Did you? Nope, I’m not. Today I want to start talking about the subsector mapping rules that are used their and one possible application that I see for them in a different sci-fi based game.

Over the last couple weeks, I have been pretty busy, but I have gone back to the Classic Traveller books a bit more as I have been exploring a new game on my horizon – Rogue Trader. I know that game has been out for a while, but hell, like I always say, I’m slow. Sorry. Rogue Trader was another of my purchases back during Christmas and I can say that I love it so far. Everything about the Core book is over-flowing with awesome, except for the fact that they don’t really give a clear and easy way of making a portion of space for you to send your starships hurtling through.

So, for that, I opened up my Classic Traveller PDF and gave things a look see. I really like how easy it is to make a Subsector using Traveller. You use an 8x10 hex grid, some dice, and a couple pages of tables and rules and you have yourself pretty much everything you need. Once again here, I love the fact that so much of the Traveller experience is so easily randomized. Not having so spend hours upon hours pondering over the composition of the universe makes me feel a very, very big sense of relief.

The other really nice thing about this rules system is that so much of the Subsector and World creation rules is not based around any mechanics, but rather around fluff and story mechanics. Apart from the presence of Gas Giants, which provide a benefit for starships in refueling, which might not work so well in Rogue Trader, the majority of these rules are very fluffy and provide an easy way to describe not only planetary and stellar systems, but also a great way of figuring out the composition of the world’s within those systems. Whether you are rolling for planetary population, government, atmosphere, or whatever, you can make your world simply and easily and relatively mechanics free.

Translating all this over to Rogue Trader then simply becomes an application of 40K terms and Rogue Trader Mechanics. Once a world gets generated, all you really need to do is figure out what kind of world that would be – is it a death world? A hive world? Maybe neither. Maybe that world is an imperial world and has military installations of the Imperium of Man. You can do pretty much whatever you want with the Classic Traveller Subsector creation rules, which provide a great baseline for conversion into Rogue Trader. The Universe, after all, isn’t that much different. Though the Rogue Trader version might use distance in a different way, nothing fundamentally has to change there either; honestly, all that you would really need to do is sprinkle some threats around your Subsector which are 40K in theme and you are rolling.

For all those Rogue Trader players out there, you will want to go back and give the Classic Traveller rules a try if you are going to GM. If you are a fan of Classic Traveller and are thinking about playing a new sci-fi game, you might want to pick up Rogue Trader and try it out.

First Map - Sigilsval, the Mad Lands

Today, I completed the first draft of my campaign world map. I made this using Artweaver, a free version of photoshop, designed for painting using a computer. It is an awesome program, created by a German company, but also available in English. I love it. It works great. I spent about 13 hours working on this today - good use of a day off in my opinion. The full size map is 36 by 24, made for poster printing. I will eventually poster print this, given some time and perfecting it. I still need to work out some of the details on the map, including shading around some of the continents, as well as some of the other fine details, such as cities and roads, but for now, the general topography of the world is on digital paper.