System: How to Host a Dungeon
Friends and I got together Friday night to hang out and host ourselves a dungeon. Behold our magnificence:
In ye old primordial age there was gold in these hills, along with caverns of plague, a great underground river and a chamber of fate.
Year 1 of recorded history:
Then the Dark Elves arrived building their great city Mensa, apparently very smart elves.
That spring they forged a gold mining colony, the Cistern of Death, compete with torture pit.
Year 2 of recorded history:
Another mining colony was formed, the Realms of Horror, also with a torture pit.
The Cistern of Death however mined into a plague infest region and many Dark Elves perished.
Meanwhile, in Mensa there was a slave revolt, an uprising where the slaves became the new masters.
Year 3 of recorded history:
A new colony was formed, the Den of Evil, torture pit included.
Meanwhile the established colonies began construction of Dark Shrines of Dame Chaos.
Mensa was to unstable after the last revolt, and so little construction was done.
Year 4 of recorded history:
As the gold vein seemed entirely tapped, excavation upward was done in search of new resources.
The new Masters of Mensa (as they called themselves) begame building a Great Temple of Dame Chaos.
So as not to be a slacker, the Den of Evil created it own Shrine, while also tunneling upwards to discover the surface!
Year 5 of recorded history:
The great Human and Dark Elf War and the end of Civilization.
Year 6 or recorded history:
The great Cataclysim. An earthquake sundered the lands tearing apart colonies and passages, as well as opening new tunnels and diverting the flow of the underground river.
Year 16 of recorded history:
Humans civilized the surface lands and built Castle Tri-Flag
Year 17 of recorded history:
The historians became very tired and gave up the ghost. There is no more history here.
What rocked
It was just plain fun scribbling all over the map, rolling dice and making wacky stuff.
This is an AWESOME resource for making dungeons. This is the kind of dungeon I would totally want to tromp thorough, or DM some group tromping through. Full of history and change.
What could have been improved
Some of the instructions were confusing. Occasionally the directions would say roll the die on the map, but then the following directions didn’t rely on the where the die landed, other times it did.
The game went on a little longer that I expected it was and ye old historians go too tired to continue.
We didn’t using tracing paper, but I think we really should have, it would have improved the passage of time and made the map look less cluttered.
