Twelve cursed dungeon rooms

1. If cut, you'll bleed to death here.
2. Time flows d4+1 times faster here.
3. Venereal diseases (and many ways to catch them).
4. Tsssssh - your light sources are dead.
5. Gravity shifts once per hour.
6. No sounds. Total silence.
7. Sounds are ten times louder here. May attract monsters from adjacent rooms and corridors.
8. Invisible acid drips from the ceiling (nasty, eh?).
9. Vacuum. No air here.
10. Floor is extremely slippery. Say yes to broken legs and arms.
11. Water supplies turn to urine. Urinating here produces napalm.
12. Roll twice and mix the results. If 6 and 7 is hit, instead of normal effect everyone in the room must save vs. death or be instantly annihilated with all their belongings.

Megadungeon design (preview)

Quick and simple idea - create megadungeon maps by copying / pasting / modifying plans of castles, churches, cathedrals and monasteries! This is only a preview of what can be created this way:

I'll try to complete it, post it and try to describe as many rooms as possible :D

Quick and easy mine design

I want to share with you my method of quick creating mines. One note: it's really quick, so don't expect any ultra-detailed, fanciful features.

Step One: Level design. open your Photoshop / Paint.NET / notebook and draw some quick, rather straight lines:

Now imagine that every line is mine corridor (they tend to be straight and sometimes long). And guess what? Your level is done!

Okay, it's not everything that you can do with it, but here any decent graphic tools will have an advantage over traditional pen and paper - they can use layers (I said "decent" before, so forget about MS Paint :D).

Step Two: Add new levels. Create a new layer and draw new set of lines with different color:

I want to add third, bottom level, containing some natural caverns:

But wait, I wanted it as bottom level!

Step Three: rearrange. Good that we may rearrange layers. In addition I want to add some labels to avoid further problems:

Moreover, If I want to use my laptop during game, I may use "interactive" version of this map, saved in .PSD format. Now I may just open Photoshop and turn visibility of that layers which are unused at the moment. Layers are named in the same way as levels:

Step Four: Additional Info. Here are additional things that you may add to your freshly created level:

• Look where corridors from different levels are crossing - it may be a good spot to place a shaft or stairway;
• You may use different colors on the same level, i.e. to show danger factor or fragments built by different miners (eg. mine was estabilished by Lizardmen, abandoned and re-used by Dwarfs);
• You may add grid to the background layer and set opacity of different levels to depict scale of the map and use it directly in game;
• Of course you may add numeric descritpions to the tunnels, rooms etc, but if you are using Photoshop remember to rasterize types and merge font layers with current dungeon level, as Photoshop adds a new layer for each usage of Type tool (I don't remember how it works in Paint.NET, I havent used it for a while).

I know that it's far from perfect method of mine creation, but it's really fast, so if you need to design some mines during gameplay, just grab your laptop computer / netbook (pdn should work pretty well on weaker computers), go to the toilet and create your new, awesome dungeon :D

T - Trap

Bored with common pits, spears and stone blocks? Here you go!

Roll 1d12:

1-2) Gravity trap A: victim is crushed by a sudden gravity growth. 2d6 damage with great possibility of breaking some bones during the fall. Victim must roll equal of less than his Strength on d100 to set free (anybody that helps him may add his STR).

3-4) Gravity trap B: victim is literally launched 2d6 meters up. when he falls he receives 1d6 damage per each five meters (or its fraction). If victim hits the ceiling, well… he receives 2 points of damage per one meter “beyond” the height of the ceiling.

5) Red’s Cage: big, rusty and animated cage. It have two limbs able to grab victim and push inside itself. AC 2, HD 6, it don’t cause any damage, but there is a 25% chance that it have something already caught (typical wandering monster for this region, but only one of them), so anybody pushed inside it may be in trouble. Cage is capable to contain 5 human-sized victims.

6-7) Click!: one of the party members steps on something… clicky (it may be a loose floor tile, stone or something else). Nothing happens until he raise his leg. If he does… nothing happens, except one thing – as long the trap button is pushed (and party members are thinking how they may save their friend) time in the dungeon passes twice as fast (especially for purpose of wandering monsters, random events, poison etc.).

8-9) Gong: another seemingly non-lethal trap. Activation of it causes the ringing of bell or gong located somewhere in the wall or ceiling of the room. It’s obvious that any inhabitant of the dungeon will hear it and probably will go to find out what happened.

10-11) Food contaminator: victim of this trap may now forget about all his food and water reserve. Any non-magical liquid he has is now transformed into urine and any food transforms into a disgusting and horribly stinking goo.

12) Spell sucker: it have no effect on characters unable to cast spells, but any spellcaster (cleric, magic user and so on) must save vs. spells. If he passes, he loses one randomly determined spell. If he fails, he loses all his prepared spells. Nice, eh?