One Page Dungeon Contest: Kill Several Demons

 

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On Friday, I was catching up on my D&D blog feed and I saw a post about this year's one page dungeon contest. I thought to myself, "Awesome! I've been meaning to enter but I always forget and miss the window, I wonder when submissions are due..." 

Turns out it was Saturday. To make a long story short, Saturday morning, I set myself the goal of making a One Page Dungeon in one day, from idea to finished PDF. 

Needless to say, I don't think I'm a real contender for the contest but I had a lot of fun making my dungeon and I hope folks will enjoy it. I'm pretty proud of what I produced on a tight deadline.

Thurstle Island

I created this demon-infested mini-dungeon to serve as the second level of my Barrow of the Twisted Worm (marked "Haunt of Demons" on the diagram below) for my Thurstle Island campaign. The third and final level, will contain the un-slumbering remains of Dendar the Night Serpent, Eater-of-Dreams.

In our last session, my players retrieved the golden key which unlocks the lower levels of the Barrow from the Crusader's ruined fort. I think they'll be returning to explore it further very soon. 

Creative Process

I've been really inspired by Linden's series of posts documenting their step by step dungeon creation project. In one of the early posts, they talked about using the "Spark Table" technique suggested as "The Grand d666" by Otsplll and pioneered (I think?) by Chris McDowell. 

I've been working on the demons for my campaign for awhile (Part 1, Part 2), and thought that they would be well served by Spark Tables. Demons are chaotic and inconsistent so adding some randomness to their genesis might spice them up. 

Once I populated the table, coming up with some crazy demons was really easy! I wanted fighting demons to feel really different than traditional bad guys so I gave them reality-shifting, rule-breaking powers. For their base stats, I'll just use trolls. 

My map started out as a post-it, flow chart doodle. My focus was on keeping it small (given my limited time and the constraints of the OPDC) while still providing variety and multiple paths. Comparing the sketch to my final map, you can see I flipped it vertically just to make keying it on one page easier (so the entrance would be near the top of the page). 

Finally, I had to put it all together. I did my layout in MS Powerpoint... Definitely, a clunky solution but I use PP a ton for work and knew I could lay out text boxes and arrows quickly. I had keyed my Bunker map with this technique a couple months ago and it was pretty easy 

The title is a reference to my favorite web-comic. 

K6BD

All in all, making this was a super fun project and I'm really glad that I decided to do it. I'm excited to run this for my players and I think that the pieces of it will come in handy for re-purposing many times in the future. I welcome feedback and would love to hear what folks think of it.