The Smokehouse Dungeon

As my Wild North Campaign continues, the party has ventured away from Gulworth Keep and the Caves of Chaos to visit Hommlet and consult Jaroo the Druid and seek further information on the local insurrection that has disturbed the Keep.

I've re-imagined Hommlet's classic "Moathouse" as a Rebel stronghold which I'm calling the "Smokehouse"

• The Rebels in Cave C are brokering the purchase of iron weapons for the Hillmen in exchange for voidstone mined in Cave D. 
• The voidstone is brought to the Smokehouse where it is cooked in a furnace, ground and processed into gunpowder. 
• Lareth the Beautiful has been re-imagined as a crazed alchemist, overseeing the voidstone transformation. 

I have tried to maintain the most memorable Moathouse encounters, while simplifying the upper ruins. Most of the animal encounters (other than the frogs) have been elided, replaced with gun-toting Rebels and an Arnold K inspired ghost. 

I've re-structured the dungeons below, to be more vertical, with a central smoke-filled chamber ascending through all the levels. Again, trying to keep the most iconic bits, while replacing the vanilla with more exciting challenges. 

The Smokehouse (above ground)

Robbing Rogues & Ruffians: d47 Search the Body Table

One of my favorite conventions of the OSR is the "I search the body" table. 

My players really enjoy treating low-level bad guys like pinatas -- beating little treats out of them.

I try to make custom search-the-body tables for every major class of enemy (I've done beastmen a couple times, bandits, oozes, philosopher apes, cultists, aliens,  monks, smugglers twice) and often one or two for every dungeon. 

Typically, these live on post-its, or index cards loose in my notebook.

David Sutherland from AD&D DMG

Maze of the Minotaur

PDM's mini, from 0:05 in the video 

Continuing on my PDM inspired, update of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, I'm doing a nearly direct rip-off of the Professor's method for Cave I: Caves of the Minotaur. 

Rather than, meticulously time-tracking and mapping through a maze (a process that many, including me, find tedious), he abstracted the maze with random movement between points of interest. Despite the simple mechanics, I had to pause and re-watch several times so I wrote it up for myself (and anyone else who wants to run it).

Mummy Hands

Little scuttling horrors. Disembodied hands skittering and leaping -- grasping, driving fingers into flesh with ab-human strength. 

They look like Thing but fill a niche with the face-hugger, the headcrab and the rot grub. An ambush, nuisance monster. Individually weak but very deadly if they slip past your defenses. 

Addams Family (1964)