Brood Pit of the Frog God

I've been itching to do more Adventure Notebooks for a while, and what better way to mark its return than with a small tribute to the outstanding Swords & Wizardry adventure I played at PaizoCon last weekend, run by Frog God Games' Bill Webb. Regardless of whether you're a fan of S&W or even of the OSR, you should grab the PDF of the S&W Monster Book from Lulu.com or wherever else it's available. If you play S&W, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or any of the seemingly endless other OD&D/BX-derived old-school variants, then you absolutely want this book. If you play with rules that don't trace their lineage to OD&D, you'll find that while the Monster Book contains a lot of exactly what you expect, it also includes enough oddball entities and familiar creatures twisted into the unfamiliar to make the PDF well worth its $5 pricetag. This Adventure Notebook pretty much leaped full-grown into my head the moment I read the entry for the froglum, and the froglum isn't the only monster that's had that effect.

• Brood Pit of the Frog God

Brigands of the Web

Not having written any of these Adventure Notebooks for a couple of months, I'd forgotten how much effort goes into one. At least I hadn't forgotten how much fun it is working with almost 100% random elements. This one feels a bit rough around the edges, but I strive to stick with the features that chance drops randomly into the mix -- that's largely the point, when these are considered from a mental exercise perspective. Plus, I've learned from long experience that I'm an unreliable judge of my own work. It's better for everyone to draw their own conclusions.

• Brigands of the Web

Adventure Notebook: The Land Beyond the Shrine

This week, Adventure Notebook takes you to the secret land beyond the forgotten shrine. This is a great little gateway to further adventure deeper down inside the Earth (or wherever your adventures take place). I'm a sucker for lost world romances, and this is the back door to the lost world.

This might be the last Adventure Notebook for a few weeks. Interest seems to be waning, if the number of page views and downloads is a reliable indicator, and my time will be at a premium until early November. We'll see how things go this coming week.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy The Land Beyond the Shrine. I'd love to hear where it leads your heroes.

• The Land Beyond the Shrine

Adventure Notebook: Maze of the Dreamer

Another Monday, another Adventure Notebook!

This one is a bit trippy, and that's by design. It's a case of an idea that's too big for this format. I'd love to design a full-size dungeon around this theme. It cries out for more. If you use this, throw in whatever else pops into your head. It will work.

The tiles in Maze of the Dreamer were drawn by David Millar, who hasn't been featured in an Adventure Notebook before now. AFAIK, Millar is the man behind Dave's Mapper, the online tool that generates these Adventure Notebook maps. I can sit in front of the computer, clicking up new maps endlessly and just exploring them with my eyeballs. Dave's Mapper is a really excellent tool. Experiment with it for a while and I'm sure you'll agree.

• Maze of the Dreamer

Adventure Notebook: The Sporcerer's Lair

Yes, that's sporcerer's lair, not sorcerer's lair. You should understand the difference after reading the notebook.

I suppose I ought to say something about rules. These little adventures clearly are aimed at early editions of D&D -- OD&D, AD&D (1 or 2), B/X -- along with any of the current crop of retroclones or OSR titles. They all work equally well in this context. I don't specify levels of play because everything about these adventure notebooks is meant to encourage seat-of-the-pants GMing. If you can run one of these notebooks at all, then you should be able to make it work for almost any group of adventurers. The target is low; in my mind, I'm always writing for characters in the level 2-5 range.

• The Sporcerer's Lair

Adventure Notebook: The Flooded Temple

This week marks the tenth installment of Adventure Notebook. That makes me happy. These started out as an exercise in rapid creativity. The challenge was to see how quickly I could design a small dungeon using a randomly assembled map of free geomorphs and a few randomly selected notions from Risus Monkey's DungeonWords. The answer was "not as fast as I'd like," but everything takes longer than I expect it to. These little dungeons have been great fun to work on, and I'll keep writing them as long as you keep making the effort worthwhile by downloading them.

To celebrate AdvNtbk 10, I added a new monster in The Flooded Temple. Of course, in this format, designing a new monster means assigning it HD, AC, damage, size, and treasure, so don't exult too much. But exult a little.

I've also compiled Adventure Notebooks 1-10 into a single PDF for the "collectors" among you. It's a non-numbered, unlimited edition, but you should still get yours now at the Adventure Notebook page.

• The Flooded Temple

Adventure Notebook: Cult of the Keepers

This week's offering involves a cult that worships ... well, just about whatever works for you will work for them, as long as they can be obsessed with the written word.

If you need help coming up with descriptions for a dozen generic traps, see my blogs on trap triggers and trap effects for plenty of ideas.

• Cult of the Keepers

Adventure Notebook: The Gnoll King's Treasury

Even the king of the gnolls needs a safe cave in which to hide his treasure. Nothing, of course, is safe from adventurers who are bent on riches or glory.

Since Next Innovator raised the subject of the location's puzzle in a comment, it probably deserves a few words of expansion. Because of the space limits inherent in Adventure Notebook, the puzzle is more brief than it ought to be. These constraints made it impossible to provide clues to how the puzzle should be solved. If it's played strictly as written, players will either guess right or guess wrong and that's that. A guessing game is not a puzzle. In play, I would embellish these bare bones with hints and feedback based on what the characters are doing. None of that feedback is written down, it's just something that I do, and I encourage other DMs to do the same. Insert whatever type of clues and feedback your players will respond to. You know what catches their eyes and sparks their neurons better than I do, anyway. These Adventure Notebooks are predicated on that type of improvisation.

• The Gnoll King's Treasury

Adventure Notebook -- Not Today

No Adventure Notebook this week. Family is visiting from out of state, leaving no time for dungeon design. There will be a new installment next week as usual.

Steve

Adventure Notebook: The Tomb of Stars

This week's installment of "Adventure Notebook" takes your heroes to a mysterious tomb that has attracted the attention of ... something bad. For more information than that, you'll need to grab the adventure and read it yourself. I'm rather fond of this one. I think it's my favorite so far.

• The Tomb of Stars

Adventure Notebook: Hive of the Vampires

This installment of "Adventure Notebook" is a bit higher-level than previous notebooks, and it includes a monster that does not exist in any monster manual, as far as I know--vampiric duergar. Coming up with stats for them is your job. My suggestion is to double their hit dice and give them most of the vampire's special abilities (your choice), but you might want to present them completely differently.

This location would work well tacked onto a larger dungeon. Butt it up to any unexplored door and it's ready to go.

• Hive of the Vampires

Adventure Notebook: Frozen Hall of Secrets

My apologies for not posting an Adventure Notebook last week. I'd like to say it was a bit hectic because of GenCon, but in fact the frenzy was caused by deadlines and a tussle with food poisoning. All is back to normal now, more or less.

This week's installment is the Frozen Hall of Secrets!

• The Frozen Hall of Secrets

Adventure Notebook: The Burned Library

Explore beyond the Burned Library in this week's installment of Adventure Notebook.

• The Burned Library

Adventure Notebook: Hallways to Hell

Monday means Adventure Notebook ... unless it's been a really busy weekend, in which case everything gets delayed until Tuesday. This week's delve is Hallways to Hell, where heat rules the lava pools.

• Hallways to Hell

Adventure Notebook: Reeking Pits of Alchemy

Monday means another installment of Adventure Notebook. This time it's "Reeking Pits of Alchemy," an enigmatic, abandoned alchemist's lab.

• Reeking Pits of Alchemy

Pocket Dungeons

One of 102 (!) geomorphs
by Dyson

I'm a sucker for small adventures, dungeons, and particularly, small dungeons. That's nothing against megadungeons. I've had awesome RPG experiences in dungeons that went on forever. But small, out-of-the-way caves, burial mounds, ruined castles, and forgotten temples exert a powerful pull on my imagination.

That's why I'm so impressed by creative exercises like the One-Page Dungeon Contest and Pocket Full of Peril. They cram a heap o' adventure into a brief format. I enjoy them so much that I'm jumping into the pool too, beginning today, with Adventure Notebook. My aim is to post a new pocket adventure each Monday.

What I like most about this minimal format is not only that the dungeons themselves are small but that the format forces descriptions to be terse. They cover the basics, provide some atmosphere, and leave the rest to the GM.

An adventure shouldn't try to do all the GM's work for him. Doing so removes the GM from the creative process and reduces him to a script reader. Yes, GMs can ignore all that excess detail and substitute their own. I suspect most do. That's what happens on those rare occasions when I use a highly detailed adventure. Who can, or even wants to, remember all those baroque widgets in the heat of the action? Pressing the pause button to reread a long room description when the door is hanging in splinters means there is no "heat of the action." No one wants to be the DM who constantly says, "wait, I forgot something that screws up what you did five minutes ago" any more than anyone wants to be the GM who just pushes pieces according to a program.

I'd rather glance at three or four lines of text (having highlighted a few key words in advance) and make up the rest on the spot. Extemporizing amplifies the feedback loop between players and GM. That feedback is what drives the best tabletop roleplaying.

Three participants sit around the game table: the players, the GM, and the rules. Minimizing any of those three roles is a bad thing. That's why single-track, railroady adventures are rightly criticized; they decrease the players' role. The same flaw afflicts overly detailed adventures. They boost the role of the rules (and the adventure writer) at the expense of the GM.

The best adventures and the best rules encourage full participation and input from everyone.