The Iron Keep Part Three- Filling out the Western Wall
Life has been getting in the way of me doing most of what I wanted to do for this outside prepping the actual rooms. It's very rude like that. In order not to keep the three people who read these posts in suspense, I'll open up with the rooms this time, and afterwards talk a bit about what I haven't been able to do.
F0
6: (Empty, no treasure)
Northern Guard room
Stone steps, heavily worn, lead an old watchtower guard room. The remains of a few cots have fared poorly over time. A supply closet door hangs open, empty. Across the open door from the room is a ladder that goes up. It doesn't look like it withstood the test of time well either. In the middle of the room is a hardwood trap door.
6B: (special, no treasure)
The haunted Cell
A small dungeon cell. A single skeleton is strung up in iron manacles, miraculously still intact in spite of all of its flesh and sinew having longs since gone. Should someone enter the room it starts screaming in Low Atrian. "OH GOD, LET ME OUT. I DIDN'T KNOW. I CAN FEEL IT MOVING. IT'S EATING ME FROM THE INSIDE" After it has stopped wailing in agony it clatters onto the floor, its bones no longer held together. The ruckus has a 1 in 6 chance of attracting the attention of a wandering monster.
7 (Monster, treasure)
The Ratty dungeon
The air in this dungeon smells mouldy. There's several large piles of straw, pieces of wood and other debris against the wall. From the walls hang the remains of 8 sets of manacles. Light is able to enter the room through the grate in the ceiling, as well as the arrow slit to the west.
In this room 11 Giant Rats (B41) are nesting. They've dragged in several pieces of corpses for their children to feed on. On a Hobgoblin corpse a sack containing 400 SP and 200GP can be found. There's another small sack that's been ripped open in the north-easterlymost nest, spreading 600SP throughout it. In the nest just south of the arrowslight there's a gunmetal coloured broach inlaid with a golden lion head; the sign of an officer in the Steel legion. The broach is worth 1000 GP.
8 (special, no treasure)
The Courtyard
A chest-high wall fences of part of the inner ward. As a defense measure, a 3 foot deep ditch has been dug at the entrance (A), crude stairs leading in and out. Over the years water has washed dirt, dust and the ever-present rust into the ditch, creating a slippy and sticky mud. Anyone walking through will have their feet caked with a orange-brown gunk. Unless scraped or washed off they will leave behind easy to follow footprints for 2d4 turns. Crumbled remnants of a building stand against the western wall, leaving behind little but waist-high parts of walls, though stairs leading to an upper floor that no longer exist speak of a second floor.
9 (empty, no treasure)
The Granary
Rotted shelves are scattered through the room, some still containing remnants of burlap sacks. The walls have stones missing from them, though the structure is still intact. It seems like the building once had a second story with a wooden roof. That has all but gone though, leaving the room open to the elements.
F1
7 (Monster, Treasure)
**Upper guard room **
The roof of the room has been battered and broken, leaving the room inside open to the sky. a small brazier in the middle of the room has all but rusted away. The floor is scattered with rubble from the roof and wet. Bones of small birds are scattered on the floor.
Hidden among the rubble in the room is a Grey Ooze (B36).
In the east well there's a small cache of valuables hidden behind a loose stone in the wall, which sticks out about half an inch. It contains 1.100SP, 50GP and a small locket of gold engraved with vines. An etch of a stately woman on the inside, and the inside of the lid has the text "Remember me always" engraved in High Atrian.
8 (monster, treasure)
Broken open guard room.
The room has been broken open by the wall at the south-east corner collapsing. The iron plates, roughly an inch thick, have hideously bent outward, curling over in a petal-like fashion. The room is covered in rubble. There's a sturdy metal grate in the floor. Due to age the hinges have rusted. It requires a combined strength of 25 to force it open.
3 Hobgoblins are searching through the room. A conversation in Goblin has a 2-in-6 chance of occuring if the players silently listen. One's asking why there would be signs of the dragon here. One of the others tells him to shut up, and precisely because there's no chance of finding the signs of it here is why they're looking here.
The hobgoblins have a locked chest they found elsewhere. It contains 4.000GP. The smallest of them has also hidden a small pouch under his armor in which he's secreted away 500SP and 200GP.
F2
2 (trap, no treasure)
North tower rooftop
The roof that the walkway surrounded has mostly collapsed as though hit by something heavy. The flagstones around also show major cracks. Some feel wobbly beneath your feet.
The structural integrity of this part has been compromised severely. For each character per turn spent here there is a 1 in six chance a flagstone breaks loose or part of the wall crumbles in, depositing the stricken character in froom F1.7. The fall will inflict 1d6 damage.
3 (empty, no treasure)
Crumbled south tower
From up here it's clear this tower has taken some serious battering. the thick metal plates at the south-western corner have been bent outwards, and half of the roof seems to have collapsed into the room below (F1.8). The walls around that corner have crumbled, leaving an uneven slope to down below, and back up to the wall to the east.
Where Bos talks about his shortcomings
A (member of my audience) asked me a poignant question: "how did you decide which part of the keep would be ruined?" It's a great question, though I don't have a great answer. My thinking was mostly "how would this have happened", which quickly led me to the ever classic "a wizard did it". I therefore decided that some sorceror allied with the demonic forces got close enough to the fortifications to unleash a horrible spell. It took down part of the wall, and made a hole in the keep behind it. Maybe I'll do something fun like leave behind a perfectly smooth glass surface on the ground there. I'm not sure yet; I haven't given much thought to that part of the project yet. I hope inspiration will strike before I get there.
In general this is much of what I do though: put down some bullcrap, and post-hoc try to make up a justification for it. Most of the time it seems to work out. I must admit that at times it has come close to sinking projects and require major reworks. For now it'll just work out though.
For today's rooms I went over and looked back at the hobgoblins. They feature on the Dungeon Level 2 tables, so I decided that the top part of the keep will be level 2, changing into level three as we venture back. I'll be rolling on the ADnD wandering monster tables for now, so there is a good chance at some point we might see some nasty stuff though. I do however think that for the next areas I do want to pre-decide which monsters will feature. I've been relatively blessed so far in that I don't dislike any of the wandering monster results, but there are plenty of results on these tables I don't think are appropriate for the (area of) the world I'll be placing this in. I might not change it for the above-ground parts of the keep. I can try to make incongruous results fit. However, in the future I might decide on themes of areas/levels/sublevels beforehand and hand-pick monsters to some degree (as the books also recommend). The reason I haven't so far is pure lazyness.
However, when I do that, I do need to keep in mind my biggest failing as a dungeon designer: I tend to fall back on mundanity. That's not a bad thing per se, but this is a megadungeon. It needs to become wild in places. There needs to be enough mythical underworld there for it to be interesting to explore. This is going to be a thing I'll need to keep in mind constantly as I create tables, but also key rooms. It'll be an ongoing process, and I need to go back and check in on how I did on those fronts every now and then to course-correct. I have some ideas on how to make a few other areas have a definite theme and interesting catches though, so we'll see.
I hope to be able to finish up the keep this month. I'll probably split it up into the north-eastern remaining portion of the keep and the south-eastern, and do one of those in each of the remaining days. God knows when I'll be able to catch up and do the rest of the admin that needs to be done for this dungeon level, but that's a problem for Future Bos. Man, I'd hate to be that guy.
So until then, count your torches and keep mapping!