The Lady and Tiger

The One Page Dungeon Contest is running again this year, and since I recently started a new home campaign and therefore have the players to (kindly) run through the ringer, I decided to enter. In fact, entering the contest this year is actually the reason I decided to create this blog. I hope to use it to keep track of play reports from my home games, as well as any content I end up making for RPGs and just general thoughts on the medium. Anyway, the theme this year is “And Still They Rise” and my first thoughts gravitated towards the obvious. A dungeon full of undead fit the bill, and I spent a week mulling around some thoughts before anything really crystalized. I settled on the idea of a crypt build beneath a ruined manor, destroyed when the locals had enough of the tyranny of their lord and his family. The lord as well as his butler would be intelligent undead, while the shades of those cursed by the family rise and shuffle throughout the halls. After settling on a defined backstory for the dungeon, I picked up an interesting map over at Dyson’s Dodecahedron and I was off to the races.

One thing I’ve really wanted to do is playtest any material I write, especially if I’m writing it in order to submit it to a contest or publish it commercially. Something I’ve learned from reading a myriad of cogent reviews is the importance of playtesting material in order to ensure that it’s coherent, gameable and actually fun. The following posts will cover my playtest dungeon key, map, and play reports in order to help crystallize what makes my entry work, what doesn’t and how I came to find out.