Adventure Notebook

One of 102 (!) 10 x 10
geomorphs by Dyson
Adventure Notebook is Howling Tower's collection of very short dungeons. My aim is to pump out one every Monday. We'll see how long I can keep that up.

This effort was inspired by some of the outstanding short dungeons elsewhere on the web. In particular, Dungeon-a-Day, the One Page Dungeon Contest, and the Pocket Full of Peril collection from the Sword & Shield blog. Besides those, I'm head-over-heels in love with the enormous range of free dungeon, cavern, wilderness, and town geomorphs (drawn and distributed by many artists) and the random dungeon/idea generators online, especially Risus Monkey's Dungeon Words and Dungeon Words d30.

The geomorphs are scattered on blogs all across the web. Dyson, who started the movement with his 10 x 10 doodles, collected most of the links on his blog. Rather than repeat his work, I direct you there. For an interactive tool, Dave's Mapper is hard to beat. Both Dyson and Risus Monkey offer simpler mappers using just their tiles.

Format-wise, I aim to keep each dungeon to a half-sheet of paper. If you print the dungeons, you can leave the other half of the page blank for notes or print them two-up so you never run out of adventure. The first ten have been compiled into a single file for your convenience, because I'm just that kind of stand-up guy.
  1. The Wight-Haunted Cave
  2. Reeking Pits of Alchemy
  3. Hallways to Hell
  4. Beyond the Burned Library
  5. The Frozen Hall of Secrets
  6. Hive of the Vampires
  7. The Tomb of Stars
  8. The Gnoll King's Treasury
  9. Cult of the Keepers
  10. The Flooded Temple
  11. The Sporcerer's Lair
  12. Maze of the Dreamer
  13. The Land Beyond the Shrine
  14. Brood Pit of the Frog God

10 comments:

  1. fantastic kick off and I really like the first installment!

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  2. Nice stuff, thanks. Already has me thinking *why* he was hanged; the pauper's grave found torn open from within, the disappearances that start near Burnet's old haunts...

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  3. Ahh got to love the one page dungeon

    Looking forward to more of these

    Cheers

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  4. These are very cool, Steve. Looking forward to seeing more.

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  5. Planning on doing more of these? I hope so.

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  6. I hope so, too. Yes, I plan to pick them up again after my current deadline crunch. Adventure Notebook should be back in production around Thanksgiving.

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  7. Great to see all of the geomorphs being put to good use. :)

    In the latest update on my mapper, I've made cartographer profiles more prominent and easy to find, and they contain full galleries of their tiles. I wasn't sure if you're doing randomly generated maps or picking specific tiles, but this could make the latter easier. Enjoy!

    (Oh, and new tiles are always welcome too!)

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    Replies
    1. I let the mapper do most of the work. Typically I click through randomly-generated maps until something catches my eye. Then I might rotate the tiles to see if there's a better arrangement. Sometimes I'll stick with one tile I really like and swap out the other to get a better fit, or one that doesn't have unconnected tunnels. But a lot of the philosophy behind this project was that randomness should guide the creativity as much as possible, so I really try to keep my preferences and prejudices out of the process. Your mapper is the perfect tool in that regard. To a large extent, my process for the Adventure Notebook was shaped to take advantage of what the mapper does so well rather than trying to adapt the mapper to my process.

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