Could this even be done? I mean, what about White Plume Mountain? Tomb of Horrors? Heck, the Caves of Chaos? Is it even possible to distill these adventures down that far without losing what they originally were?
Part of the challenge of Tomb of Horrors (for instance) is just how many different dangerous obstacles there are... it is the sheer volume of traps that makes it the meat grinder it is. Each 'room' in the five-room dungeon would therefore need several obstacles to overcome. For example, the entry would have three halls as options, and two of these are deadly traps. Maybe this could be expanded to five... so you could right away build a whole bunch of dangerous traps into the first encounter area, and that echoes a little bit of the scale of danger of the original.
This kind of design challenge checks all the boxes for me. I like echoing iconic and classic as much as possible, and is it very, very tight. The entire thing would fit onto the front of a sheet of standard paper (map and five keyed encounter areas).
So with the Caves of Chaos you could have the Minotaur's maze, the Owlbear den and the Shrine of Chaos leaving me with two areas housing a couple of the 6 factions (goblin, hobgoblin, orc, bugbear, gnoll, kobold), maybe with slaves from the other four ?
ReplyDeleteRight. That seems like a logical organization.
Deletemap ! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vOy0zkRxvVoGwa1RIrYliLSqoLQ1KHIEL7ES7or9ZN0/edit?usp=sharing
ReplyDeleteI like how you're thinking :)
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