#Dungeon 23 Project - The Ruins of Mount Auyán (Day 001)

Sean McCoy at this link laid out the challenge of doing a dungeon room a day for all of 2023. He says: 

Well, I love dungeons and megadungeon play, but writing a megadungeon is difficult! It takes a lot of energy and it’s hard to know when to work on it and for how long. This simplifies things.

A dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023. That’s 365 rooms. I’ll do a level a month, so 12 levels. Every week is a little area of 7 rooms, so I can keep my focus small.

I am going to answer the call and do this myself and post daily for 365 days to create a dungeon.  But I am going to disagree with him a little bit. First of all, I would say that a dungeon of 12 levels and 365 rooms is not a mega-dungeon. IMO it is on the small end of the range of medium sized dungeons.

The second thing that I am going to disagree with him about, is that it takes a lot of energy. I don't believe that. First of all, I do not normally sit down and create a dungeon outside the game. I have always created my dungeons in game in real time on the fly. Bitd we typically played for 8 hours two days in a row for 16 hours, sometimes we played a lot longer than that. Over two days we often played 20 hours or more.  IMO creating dungeons that way is fun and energizing.  He also talks about keeping his focus small, to which I would  reply, "Why?"

Aside from the things of which I disagree with him, I thought it was a very good post, I like the idea and I wish him and everyone who is doing this, great success. I hope everyone of us is able to keep up and post every day for 365 days and I hope that no one has any real world tragedies mess this up for them.

As an aside you may want to read this post about my first dungeon.

One note about the writing of the actual rooms below. I am going to write down what runs through my mind as I think about each room. In game, I don't necessarily provide all of that information to the players. Information given is fairly terse and concise. Questions by the players elicit more information, based on the questions they ask. They often ask questions, that will not be part of what I write here and those questions are to be answered on the fly as they occur.

Important note: This campaign uses a Silver Standard, so Copper has more than enough value to carry out of the dungeon or wilderness. Silver is found in smaller quantities than Copper, Gold in much smaller quantities than Silver, but its value is quite high, Platinum is rare and extremely valuable (a required component of the special magical inks used in the making of scrolls. There are other valuable rare metals. Copper is 120 coins per pound, Silver is 240 coins per pound, Gold is 180 coins per pound and Platinum is not found as coins, but as quarter pound bars that are worth 5 times their weight in Gold. 

So now on to the dungeon beneath The Ruins of Mount Auyán.

The adventuring party arrives  at the Ruins early in the day. They set up camp and their hirelings will take care of the livestock and keep things together while the party are underground. They have been at this a while, so they have a couple of wagons and a goodly amount of supplies and are prepared to stay awhile. 

They start combing the Ruins and by mid-afternoon they have found a couple of old stairways that are filled with debris and after some discussion decide to just clear one and not both. It is near dusk when it has been cleared enough to be passable and they set a guard on it for the night. 

In the morning they start down into the dungeon. The steps are worn as those many thousands of feet have trod them for many years. At the bottom of the steps is a landing area roughly 40 by 40 in area and there are 8 corridors leading out of this area, two to the front, two on either side and two to the rear on either side of the stairs. None of them have doors, nor is there any sign that they ever did.

This concerns them some; however, they do have an experienced group of henchman and hirelings to watch the camp and to ward the stairs and keep watch over it.

After a short discussion, they decide to take the front right corridor first. The initial landing is a bit damp from recent rains that drained down into the dungeon, but there is no standing water and they do find a couple of drains that are only partially clogged. The floor is cobblestone and that continues into the corridors. They did not hear anything at any of the corridors and they all have a slight musty smell. What will they find?

Level One

So we have:

Corridor 01 - front right

Corridor 02 - front left

Corridor 03 - left front

Corridor 04 - left rear

Corridor 05 - right front 

Corridor 06 - right rear

Corridor 07 - rear left

Corridor 08 - rear right

***********************************************************************************

Corridor 01 - front right - standard 10x10 design, cobblestone floor and the walls are mortared stone.

Twenty feet in, there are heavy wooden doors on both sides of the corridor facing each other. Each door has a wooden handle but no lock or latch. 

#1 The door on the right is swelled and will be very difficult to open, but once opened you can tell it is designed to swing shut and it is heavy enough that it takes some effort to hold it open. Inside this room is old broken furniture, chairs and tables, quite a bit of dust, rodent droppings and it looks like at one time there where things hung on the walls. Perhaps mirrors or tapestries and such. There are no traps or secret doors to find and wise players will quickly scan this room and move on. 15'x15'

#2 The door on the left is also swelled shut, is not nearly as tight as the other and it is only moderately difficult to open. This room has much same contents as the first room, but one of the chairs is intact and although the dust on the floor is not disturbed, the chair has the dust brushed off the seat as though someone recently sat in it. There are no traps, but there is a secret door in the floor underneath the chair, if found and opened it is a chute 4'x4' which leads by a slide down to the 3rd level of the dungeon.  20'x15'

Another twenty-five feet down the corridor they come to two more doors across from each other. These are metal doors that appear to be very heavy and they have locks and pull handles, the locks may be locked.

#3 The door on the right can be opened by picking the lock or using a spell to open the door. This room has no dust. In the center of the room is a table and four chairs, all in really good condition. To the right of the door there are two cabinets, the back wall has a tapestry with rolling hills and a stream running through it. In the distance is a giant, oddly enough if you study the image the giant moves towards you. To the left, the wall has a map of the area that you traveled through outside to get here. The map features are not quite like the current area, but very close. If they stand and look at the tapestry for a full turn the giant will move forward close enough to reach out into the room and grab someone, pulling them into the tapestry, if this happens the players can follow their party member into the tapestry. As long as no one stares at the tapestry for a full turn, nothing will happen. There are no traps or secret doors to find. 20'x20'

#4 The door on the left will be found to not be locked, although the door is a bit difficult to open. This room has a long low table with 10 cushions on the floor around it. On the table sit four metal pitchers, one has a clear liquid, one a bright yellow liquid, one a dark purple liquid and one a green liquid. Beaded moisture is on the outside of these pitchers. If tasted the clear liquid seems to be cold spring water. If drunk, it is just water. If tasted the bright yellow liquid will be bitter, if drunk extreme nausea and vomiting will last for an hour and weakness lasting a day will result. If tasted the dark purple liquid will be very sweet, if drunk hallucinations will last for two days. If tasted the green liquid will be invigorating, if drunk a person would not have to rest or sleep for two days. If any of these is poured into a flask, they turn to dust in the pouring. The pitchers cannot be removed from the room. The walls shimmer like heat in the air, but no heat is felt. There are no traps or secret doors to find. 20'x20'

Another 20 feet down the corridor and the slope of the corridor angles steeply down and over the next 100 feet you drop at least 20 feet in elevation. The corridor appears to dead-end into a 35'x35' room that is completely empty, but it does have the following:

On the right side there are rooms

#5, #6 and #7 10'x10' rooms with door opening but no doors in place. In each of these rooms is table with two chairs and a lit lamp in the middle of the table. A smell of incense is in each of these rooms. Anyone who sits in one of the chairs will see in front of them across the table a woman with dark hair and exotic features and clothing looking into a crystal ball. She will be speaking a language that cannot be understood. No one not sitting can see the woman or the crystal ball.  She will stop talking and look at you expectantly, if you give her a gold coin, you will be able to understand her and she will tell you things you don't want to know and you will be in a hurry to leave the dungeon. When you get up, she disappears and it will take your companions a bit of time to calm you down. In a few minutes you will not able to remember anything she said, but her beauty will haunt you a long time.

#8 On the left side of there is a single door, a large heavy wooden door with metal reinforcement. This door is stuck and will be very difficult to open.  Inside the room is are 8 bunk beds. Beside each are two dressers. The bottom drawers on each will contain blankets, the top drawers will be empty. These beds are standard size. There are four tables each with four chairs. There is no dust and the room has an air of recent occupancy. All the walls are bare except at the center of the back wall a floor to ceiling mirror four feet wide is attached to the wall. If you are directly in front of the mirror you see the room behind you. If you look at the mirror from the side you see a completely different room full of orcs staring at you as they draw their weapons. If you continue to stare at the mirror from an angle for a full turn, that view becomes reality and you and your companions will be attacked. Otherwise nothing will happen. *If you break the mirror there is a secret passage behind it, a five foot wide corridor that will lead 20 feet to a door and behind that door is stairway leads down. 30'x30'

Back out in the main area the wall ahead of you is blank and there are no traps or secret doors to find. The wall on either side of the stairs is also blank and there are no traps or secret doors to find.

*I will eventually come back to this.