Five Room Dungeon Tables

I need to make up some Five Room Dungeons, so I wrote some tables for inspiration. Five room dungeons are an idea from John Four that makes a dungeon from five small challenges. The rooms can be large or small and arranged in many formations. The rooms are:

       1.       Entrance or Guardian

       2.       Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge

       3.       Trick or Setback

       4.       Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict

       5.       Reward, Revelation, or Plot Twist.

The first thing I wanted was a theme table to tie the rooms together. I decided on eight different themes or places the dungeon could be.

Next I started to work on the rooms. I made some separate table and started brainstorming ideas fitting them into each list. After a few items, I started to come up with things that could fit in multiple lists, sometimes all of them! I decided to take another approach, to break each room up into what generic things could be in them. I came up with something to negotiate with (person), something to find (place), and something to overcome (thing). I was looking for nouns! Now I made lists of people, places, and things. As I looked over these I saw that some of them fit more naturally into the room designs. People fit more naturally into rooms one and four, places in one or three. I decided to weight each room with a negative, zero, or positive; from there picking a randomizer that fit my odds (thanks anydice).

I started tweaking my lists of nouns and realized I needed to weight one of the tables to make some places (planar) more rare. Instead of testing this out with dice, I wanted to run some really quick rolls and see instant results. I wrote an excel sheet to help me quickly randomize, copy, and paste. I forgot about the weighting I had done for the places, and you’ll see that in my original results. Without further ado, here are my six Five Room Dungeons.

1) Treasure Vault

Entrance or Guardian: Upon opening this hidden away area, you notice that it is or was recently inhabited. A tattered rug covers the floor, a table and 2 chairs sit off to the side, a small collection of books on a shelf of a bookcase, a comfy chair for reading and a long hallway stretches off in the distance. The rug hides a pressure plate that starts a slow rumbling in the hallway. If the players move it they can beat the crumbling hall. If the players wait, they realize that they will be cut off from the rest of the dungeon if they don’t move. Dexterity saving throw will get them past the falling rocks with no damage, half for failure. After the hall crumbles, it will take 250 man hours to unearth the whole 250 feet.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: There is a woman, Sarin, caught in a circle of magical energy. She tells the party if the salt circle is broken, she can go free. She is a high level thief looking to loot the vault. She will betray the party if necessary.

Trick or Setback: This is a large room, it has small mouse sized holes that lead into hidden areas in the walls and ceiling. There is a hag, Hilda, hiding here who entered a pact to guard the vault for 101 years. If the vault is breached she will be trapped here forever. The hag uses the holes to enter the walls and cast from cover.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The vault is locked by a large circle divided in to four quadrants. They are colored yellow, blue, brown, and white. To open the lock a spell from each element (fire, water, earth, and air) must be cast in secession. The order does not matter, as long as they are cast one after another.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: Aside from gold in the vault, there is also a Ring of Three Whooshes. It can cast longstrider three times per day.

2) Giant Burial Chambers

Entrance or Guardian: An unnatural pond, on a mountain top far from much of anything. If you submerge yourself in the pond you will emerge in a dark, carved stone entry room with a similar pool.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: Three stone giant ghosts guard this area. They will warn the characters (in giant) not to disturb the contents of the tombs.

Trick or Setback: A stone Giant lairs here, melded into the stone and watching over the tombs. He has been shunned by his people for something he did long ago.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: A fey lurks here in the shadows, seeking revenge on the giants that lay here. The fey will encourage the characters to seek the sword.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: A sword that contains their souls is here, if used and reduce a creature to 0 HP it will release a soul as a giant shadow under the welders control for 1 hour before vanishing. It has 10 'charges' and turns to a non-magical sword after they are all used, damning the giants souls to the abyss.

3) Shadow Monastery

Entrance or Guardian: A haunted monastery lies in near ruins, the veil between worlds is thin here and shadowy apparitions of the former students can be seen eternally practicing, trapped between life and death. An entrance can be found deep in the bowels of the old monastery, linking to a shadowfell version of the building.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: A monk on the other side says that they are all trapped here by a bell that can be heard ringing in the distance.

Trick or Setback: If the party goes toward the sound they will have an encounter with aggressive monks.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The Bell is a construct with sonic attacks.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: Before the monk leaves the shadowfell behind, he will open a portal back and give the party a ghost rune. Ghost rune can be transferred to a non-magical suit of armor or weapon. If attached to a weapon, weapon can instead do cold or necrotic damage. If a creature is immune to cold damage, it is reduced to resistant for this attack; if it is resistant it is reduced to normal damage. If the creature does not have a resistance or immunity to cold damage and cold is chosen, critical hits to three times the normal effect.

4) Tower on the Border

Entrance or Guardian: A haunted tower is guarded by the ghost of a wizard, he warns that the darkness shall destroy you.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: There is a black pudding here trapped in a large glass container with a door facing out. On the other side of this large room is an area that has one inch holes in the floor that go down twenty feet to a pressure plate that opens a secret blue portal. The pressure plate must have the weight a large creature on it (the black pudding). The black pudding can then squeeze its way through a passage under the floor and back into the glass container through a hole in the bottom, resetting the puzzle.

Trick or Setback: There is a portal on each wall of this rectangular room, the one the characters step through changes to a different color (green). The other portals are (right to left) black, yellow, and red. If the players choose any but the black, they are teleported d4 hexes (24 miles each) away.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The wizard from the entrance is here and shadow touched. He is invisible and holds the key of a great cage that surrounds the party. There are signs of someone have been here recently and a tracking check will lead them to bump into the wizard. Defeating the crazy wizard or otherwise finding the key will let the PCs out of the cage. The wizard will explain how the players can get back using the closest shadow portal (d4x6 miles away).

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: The wizard wears a robe of illusion, it has seventeen charges that can be used to can cast an illusion spell from zero to fourth level (DM chooses one spell per level). Each spell can be cast for the spells level +1 charge; e.g. a cantrip is 1 charge, a first level spell is 2 charges. It disintegrates after the last charge is used.

5) Prison of the Ravager

Entrance or Guardian: A shadowfell prison holds a bound carrion, or ghoul demon. To enter the foul jail requires a pound of flesh placed into a bedrock mortar in a large boulder in an out of the way place in the forest.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: The Ravager has been imprisoned here for countless years, he asks the party to free him and offers to make them generals in his army as well as lead them out of the prison.

Trick or Setback: This room contains five cauldrons full of burbling liquids. When the red, green, blue, yellow, and orange liquids are drank by themselves they do nothing, when mixed together they do a random result.

2d6	Effect
2	+1 strength
3	+1 intelligence
4	Paralyzed for an hour.
5	+1 wisdom
6-8	Aged by twenty five percent of current age.
9	+1 charisma
10	Polymorphed into a sheep for an hour.
11	+1 constitution
12	+1 dexterity

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: An undead fey guards the exit and will die before he lets the demon leave. He knows the Ravager’s true name.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: There is a secret room that has a magic mouth that speaks the demons true name, Catullus.

6) Astral Erratic

Entrance or Guardian: An Astral dragon, Ansmon, makes his lair in this huge chunk of rock and stages attacks on astral raiders from here.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: A very young, seventy-five, elven ranger, Laira resides here and serves as guardian to the dragon’s lair. She was captured infiltrating the dragon’s lair and has since joined the cause.

Trick or Setback: A monk, Ranek, lives here, forced into a contract when the dragon destroyed his monastery on a separate errant in the astral plane. He has been here for only a few years, arriving after the Laira.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The dragon will attack any who enter here without Laira.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: The dragon keep a journal of his conquests, including mind wiping Laira after destroying her trespassing family.

Next is tweaking of the tables to a specific area and using specific monster instead of generic placeholders.

More hexcrawling

I’m working on a few new systems for my hexcrawling and thought I’d bring you all on the ride! I mention my time pool and thought I’d explain it here. Every time a player does an action that takes between three and ten minutes I drop a die in the time bucket. Once a sixth die is dropped in there or if they do something that would attract unwanted attention, I roll the dice and check for an encounter. The number of successes correlates (ideally) with the encounter difficulty. OK, time to get to work.

I’m trying something new for my random encounters, traces, spoor, and encounters. I’m also counting successes by setting a base DC for an encounter and then subtracting my roll to get a degree of severity. Each degree checks off a box in order of traces, traces, tracks, spoor, lair, and creature, each step revealing more of the possible encounter. I’ve decided to start this because of how I roll encounters (with a time pool) for dungeons. Right now I’ve set DCs for five categories. Let’s take a look.

Desolate	Unsettled	Frontier	Scattered	Dense
19	18	17	16	15

So if the frontier encounter roll is 19, three boxes are checked (17, 18, 19); so traces, traces, and spoor is found. The next encounter check will add to the same set of boxes and will clear after the encounter roll for overnight. Using six mile hexes rolling once for each hex and once for rest will get me five rolls. Of course, thinking more on that, that’s only on easily traveled land. This leads me to think there will never be an encounter on a mountains hex as it takes one day to cross a mountain hex. Also wild encounters may be more prevalent in unsettled territory than in densely populated areas, but encounters in general may not be. So let’s change some things.  I think I will roll encounters based on time and use these descriptors and DCs instead.

Creature population	Dense	Scattered	Desolate
Encounter DC	19	17	15

That makes it so I can roll every four hours bringing the daily total to six encounter rolls two of which being at night. So this seems to work out for monsters, but in civilized areas there will be more encounters with humanoids. We can count the lair as a camp, outpost, or hideout. I’m thinking we can skip some of the smaller steps in the ladder if we want. Say finding some traces and spore next encounter rolling past lair and heading straight to creature. Switching lair and creature in the order is an option too, resetting the boxes after a creature is rolled.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to keep track of now and the way I’m keeping track of time on my encounter worksheet is not working out anymore. Here’s a list of things I need to keep track of:

·         Time

·         Days

·         Encounter level

·         Encounter DC

·         Rounds

·         Torches/Light (1hour/4hours)

Rounds

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Minutes (mark torch or lantern in top)

5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	55	60

Hours (mark torch or lantern in top)

12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11

Days

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Easy! I’m not sure where to put torches at, I’ll leave them in both hours and minutes for now and see where I use it the most. Hours seem like the most for me because I use a time pool to track hours, but that’s only indoors.  Now I’ll just format, print, and laminate it and have exactly what I need. I printed it out with graph paper on the back and presto, a new tracker for my table, hopefully it lasts through testing.

Draft of my HLG blog post

This is a post from my patreon page.

I have a monthly post on https://www.highlevelgames.ca/blog. Here's a preview of my next one.

6 reasons why I like DNDBeyond
DNDBeyond has been out for a while now, it promised a new way to access the system and new tools to help with our games. I've had a lot of time with DNDBeyond as a DM and player, so it's time for me to give it a proper review. Here are six things I like and one thing I dont.
1) Ease of Reference
This has got to be the number one benefit to using DNDBeyond. I use this more than anything and as long as I'm spelling it right it works well. It suggests as you type in a dropdown and after the search comes back as well. Searching for a spell or monster in the middle of combat is fast and will even show a preview of the top result so I can start reading right away. In addition to searching, having multiple tabs open to different monsters or spells is a wonderful substitution for phone pics or typing in notes. Linking is also possible if you want to have an encounter ready in OneNote, or your own digital note tool. If you dig into the code a bit you can even link to specific headers on the page! I have even set up a DM screen in OneNote with links to the appropriate rules.
2) Popup Links
Hovering over a hyperlinked spell, actions, conditions, items and other mechanical bits will give you a quick popup (providing your resolution is above a certain threshold) detailing that bit. It's super useful for conditions and spells. You can even add these into your own homebrew creations.
3) Travel Light
I am an over prepared DM. I like to have a lot of things ready at my table if I need them. Sometimes I pack a rolling bag full of minis to bring to a game. With DNDBeyond, I can leave all the books at home. With eight rules references and 12 adventures, this can get big. I also have all the monsters, items, and characters bits from all the adventures integrated into the main lists, saving me having three books open at once for one monster casting spells. A tablet paired with my All Rolled Up makes it so I can have all my 5e gaming needs (and any others system in pdf) in a small, easily portable package.
4) Custom Homebrew and Tools
The DNDBeyond team has been working hard at delivering editors to create our own (at the time of this writing) backgrounds, feats, magic items, monsters, races, spells and subclasses. They've even made adding homebrew an easy task, not some technical chore, so you can let your creative juices flow. Using DNDBeyond with chrome opens up a whole other avenue of customization with plug ins that let you easily link sections, as well as organize and build your own encounters, initiative lists, and even add links on maps to their respective room descriptions! The team has really supported the community in the building of the site.
5) Sharing Books
While still limited to three campaigns DNDBeyond lets you share your whole library with anyone in those campaigns. You can post notes (and DM secrets) to the campaign, whitelist homebrew content (your as well as others), and, as a DM view character sheets. This is great during preparation if you are looking to notify everyone of something, such as the next game time, and creating encounters balanced to the party.
6) Printing and Reading
I've encountered a couple of tricks while using DNDBeyond. Viewing on a mobile device, or with a browser at a smaller width, and using a scrolling screenshot, I can screen shot an item and print it out on a three by five card to hand out to my players. Reading on mobile or tablet is nice, especially with the app that is in beta, but I do most of my reading on a kindle. With the save to kindle extension installed in chrome I can view the books a chapter at a time and send them formatted for reading to my kindle.
All in all, I find DNDBeyond to be a boon to DMs and useful as a player. The site is being worked on and updated constantly, more and more non-retail book content is being added, like Lost Laboratory of Kwalish, and someday maybe even non Wizards of the Coast products will be on there.  There are no reasons for me not to embrace this fully, while I love the feel of a book, I prefer digital because of space and manufacturing resources. Not being able to flip through the book to recognize a specific page I see as being its greatest flaw, but I have only encountered this in books I have read before DNDBeyond existed.
Richard Fraser has been roleplaying since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons and started with the red box in the eighties. He currently prefers to DM fifth edition D&D, though reads a lot of OSR and PbtA. He currently has podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets and maintains a blog, both of which can be found at www.slackernerds.com.

Cockatrice nuggets 38 up

There's a great recap done by one of my players in this episode. I also talk about my zine and answer a few calls.

Cockatrice nuggets #36

I got to have a sit down with Collin Green of Spikepit fame!

Listen to this episode of my podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets - a D&D podcast, 36 - Cockatrice Pit https://anchor.fm/rich-fraser/episodes/36---Cockatrice-Pit-e2lt1e

https://anchor.fm/spikepit

New High Level Games post

This is a copy of the post that appears here.

Metagaming, in a board game, is the game above the game. It's the social savvy in Bohnanza or Monopoly, tricky wording and deals in Cosmic Encounter or Diplomacy, or the planning ahead needed in a game of Chess or Risk. Metagaming is a board gaming skill used in most games, from Yahtzee to poker. So why is it so frowned upon in role playing games? The common scenario is that a group of players come across a troll and start burning it or throwing acid and the GM calls shenanigans. I believe this is because the dungeon master feels cheated because their encounter becomes trivialized with the knowledge the players bring to the table. In my opinion, player knowledge and skill helps the players get into the game. Who, in a fantasy world rife with orcs, trolls, and vampires, would venture out to fight monsters with no common knowledge? Tell me, how do you kill a vampire? Do you think someone who lived in a world where vampires really exist would have more or less knowledge than you? Taking all that into perspective metagaming takes many forms that we just don't recognize. Let's take a look at some of the oft overlooked forms of metagaming that we already do at the table and then we can talk about that player who brings a monster manual to the table.

1) It's A Game

First up, the shortest answer: it’s a game. Frank the fighter doesn't know what second wind or weapon proficiencies are. He only knows how to power through and what he can wield. Anytime you invoke mechanics not based in the fiction, react with rules, or state an action to perform, you are metagaming. 

2) Player Skill

D&D has its roots in player skill. It is only in the later editions that emphasis on skill checks have made their way to the front of gaming. Deciding when to cast a spell or invoke an ability is player skill. Figuring out puzzles or how to get past an obstacle is the player using their skill to complete a challenge. Skill use is still metagaming by using a mechanic to eliminate a barrier. By leaving the decision in the players hands they can be the guide of their character and keep them in the game longer.

3) We're All Playing Together

Hey, let's have fun. We don't need to come down on a player that uses common sense, even if it's outside of a fictional character. Keeping the game moving and fun sometimes needs a little nudge from outside of the fiction. Sometimes the player, if they realize they've gotten off track, can be creative and move the group back in the right direction. If everyone focused on the fiction, there may be no reason to play after one adventure because that haul set you up for years. Besides, adventuring is stupid and dangerous. But since we all got together to roll some dice with familiar characters, buck up young cleric and head to into that dungeon anyway!

4) PvP Can Be Fun...

...but only when everyone has bought in. Can we have a discussion in real life before we start a fight to assure that we are all on the same page? We can in a role playing game, and if we can see both sides of the disagreement it makes the player versus player all the more fun. What could be more fun than taking the age old “paladin versus thief” conundrum meta? Maybe the paladin’s player sees the thief’s player roll a pickpocket check, but tells the dungeon master that he wants to hear the reaction and go to the person aid when they discover what’s missing.  This can build tension at the table instead of resentment, especially if the thief’s player can get meta and explain the (lack of) remorse when the party offers to help retrieve the item. Other players can chime in with ideas that could lead to the thief planting evidence on one of her biggest adversaries and pinning the theft on them! A whole scene, and maybe an adventure, created by using the players to control the characters and the scene. So meta.

5) Keeping Secrets Is Bad

Who's the new guy and why is he so quiet? What's he hiding? If we all know these things at the table, then we can ask leading questions and make our scenes all the better. Why worry if the dungeon master brought in a ringer if the DM can just say, “this guy will betray you, but your characters don't know it.” What an exciting betrayal you all can set up together. I love working with my players to make plots against their characters. Two heads (or even more) are better than one, so why not let them in on the fun?! Of course I still like to play some things close to the vest, if only for the surprise factor.

Cooperative storytelling works a lot better if we all work together to advance the fiction. How better to bring a team together than by taking input from all sources? It’s like a brainstorming session; there are no wrong answers, only ideas! By sourcing our table and asking what is good for our fiction we can go beyond the limits of one mind and can riff off of each others’ suggestions. Playing in and building together a shared world remains the best reason to accept metagaming at your table.

Richard Fraser has been roleplaying since the early days of Dungeons and Dragons and started with the red box in the eighties. He currently prefers to DM fifth edition D&D, though reads a lot of OSR and PbtA. He currently has podcast, Cockatrice Nuggets and maintains a blog, both of which can be found at www.slackernerds.com.

Picture provided by the author

 

Cockatrice Nuggets #35

This weeks Midgard: Zobeck recap. It was a short session, but we got some stuff done.

Cockatrice Nuggets - a D&D podcast, 35 - Midgard D&D recap - Sumnes and Camayd (Se1Ep14)

https://anchor.fm/rich-fraser/episodes/35---Midgard-DD-recap---Sumnes-and-Camayd-Se1Ep14-e2lg1a

Dungeon World

Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and new rulings

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (W:DH) is more than just a setting or adventure; Wizards of the Coast used it to sneak some new interpretations of the rules. Reading through this adventure, I caught a lot of unique situations that gave old rules a new twist or brought up something hither-to uncovered by the fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons rules. Here, in order of useful, interesting and annoying, are the things I found in W:DH.

Stealth is an oft used skill at my table, the ability to sneak past or up to your enemy is a nice option to have. W:DH gives two additional options in the case your sneak-thieves need a little help. Take disadvantage on stealth to give someone else advantage, I really like this as it moves the math around and someone with a high stealth can be seen to pad load armor or cast stones off in a different direction to distract the perceiver's attention from the character being aided. A second little tweak gave advantage to those trying to sneak through a carpeted house. From this we can see the developers (of this adventure, at least) intended to have advantage handed out regularly.

Stealth wasn't the only check that got some options, gambling players (Three Dragon Ante) get to roll Intelligence (Gaming Set) to win a game. I never came up with this myself, using sleight of hand instead, but now I will have this to fall back on. I think if I use it I will restrict it to cards/dice/board games depending on the gaming set chosen by the player. There is a combination safe hidden somewhere in Waterdeep and if you want to try to open it you need to make a Dexterity (investigation) roll. I would have went for Intelligence (Thieves' Tools), but the designer's choice fits better (and there is no stethoscope in Thieves' Tools). Combat got a little love, with the first ever strength based longbow appearing. It acts like a normal longbow but is larger and its damage is 2d6 plus strength modifier, bumping up average damage by 2.5! 

Instead of making non-player characters entirely new stat blocks, the writers just directed you to currently published stat blocks and added racial abilities to them. This is something that third party publishers (like Kobold Press in Tome of Beasts) have used before, but to my knowledge, this is it's first appearance in fifth edition. This makes good use of the NPC Features table in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Speaking of tables, the awesome Rooftop Chase Complications table has some good ideas for things to throw at players in cinematic rooftop chases.

Some of the more interesting things I found are more niche uses. There is a slime covered floor that causes problems (difficult terrain) for creatures without the slippery trait. A fresco that charms you in to hanging around and protecting it. More information on running a business is great to have. Faction quests, Scroll prices, and weather effects round out this list of may be useful in your campaign things.

Only a few things stuck out as bad in my eyes. Advice on ending chases mostly came to "or when you want the chase to end," which is to say they aren't relevant and are just exposition. In my eyes that's stuff that should just be explained; giving a player no chance of changing the outcome is a bad presedent to set. Also making a map with ten foot squares is another odd choice of the developers. Fifth edition dungeons and dragons uses a five foot square grid for miniature play and all the maps in it's products should support that. The only other thing bad I can say about W:DH is that they use pages to reprint monsters who aren't in the monster manual. I get the idea behind this, but it feels like a waste to have multiple sources with the same monster.

All in all, if you like official adventures this is another step forward for wizards of the Coast. I like that the adventure makes me reconcider some of the ways to use rules by giving new examples. I really like the modularity of the book and will reuse a lot of the material in here for my homebrew campaign even though I am not planning on running it yet. You can buy Waterdeep: Dragon Heist at your friendly local game store or on Amazon (affiliate link).