Beneath the Abbey of Iron: Designing my Dungeon

 I've been in a bit of a creative rut lately.

My home game is running through the Keep on the Borderlands, using Shadowdark RPG.  I'm adding to it based on some of my favorite supplemental content from the web, but it's not quite scratching my itch to make something cool and dark and fucked up.

So, I opened up my various notebooks and found this:

This was a small dungeon that I cribbed together over the course of a few hours to add some context to a Curse of Strahd game I was running a year or two ago.  The crux of it all was that in an ossuary behind a waterfall, the party found thousands of skulls and murals telling the bloody history of Barovia.

I LOVED this dungeon.  It was probably my second favorite thing that came out of my reworking of Strahd (my favorite being the way that I ran the church encounter in the village of Barovia, but that's work for another day).

 

Anywho, I decided to take the basis of this dungeon and expand on it, Jacquays the map, and add more grim, evil flavor (including adding in an impromptu addition I made while running it).  And then, while fiddling with the new map, I thought "hey, why not do a quick blog series as I work on it?  Surely SOMEONE cares what you have to say about things!"  (Spoilers: No.  No one cares what I have to say.  But my ego is *just* big enough to still think someone might)

 

So, in that spirit, I present to you: Beneath the Abbey of Iron

I'm going to publish this as a pay-what-you-want product on Itch once it's done (with a fully paid version that has art and other cool stuff available when I get around to it), so I'm not gonna waste a ton of time here with my writing process.  Instead, I'll summarize the backstory of the adventure:

The party receives an invitation to the Abbey of St Eberhardt the Unyielding, a saint in the Imperial Pantheon (my homebrew religion based loosely on Warhammer Fantasy).  The Abbot, Abbot Bertholf, informs the party that five of his initiates have gone missing -- they went down into the catacombs beneath the Abbey and never returned.  The Abbot has long suspected that the Abbey was built above an ancient ruin, and he believes that his initiates discovered a way into it.  The Catacombs are strictly off limits to all, but young men are often impetuous.

The Abbot (and all the monks) are actually Chaos Cultists, who are seeking a powerful relic that they believe to be housed beneath the abbey.  They killed the monks that lived here and hid their bodies in wine barrels and in sarcophaguses in the catacombs.  Their compatriots went into the ruins and have not returned, and the Abbot plans to use the adventurers to clear out the dungeon and then backstab them at the end.

The party, drawn maybe by the desire to do good or maybe by the lure of the treasures of ancient ruins, head down into the catacombs:

B1. The Abbey Basement

1. Cellar

Dank, musty.  Barrels of wine and grain.  East Door: Heavy Iron, ornately carved w/ religious images, unlocked.

2. Store Rooms

Dank, slightly metallic odor.  Wine Barrels (if opened, find pickled bodies of Monks!  Evidence of violent deaths.)

3. Catacomb

Musk, dust, decay. Lit by torch sconces.  Walls lined with carved out hollows for bodies (linen wrapped, skeletal).  Some bodies replaced with murdered monks (1/6 chance to discover if examining bodies).  Secret Passageway (Rm 7) behind one body (1/12 chance to discover if examining bodies).

4. Sarcaphogus Room

Stone Sarcophagi (carved w/ edifices of knights), large hole smashed through ground (Torch can see 30’ of broken stone down, dark beyond).  Leads to Rm 5 of B2 – 60ft down to next level).

5/6 Antechamber/Stairs Down

(In retrospect, I’m going to make this one room.  There’s no reason for it to be separate)

5. Catacomb Chapel

Heavy air, faint odor of incense.  Statue of St Eberhardt w/ altar.  Walls covered in hollows for bodies.  South Wall broken stone, revealing cavern passage leading down.  Excavating tools laying off to the side.

7. Secret Treasury

Behind a body, through a crouched passageway.  Two treasure chests, one has gold candle sticks (2, 25 gp/ea), silver plates (set of 6, 5gp each), a gold holy symbol w/ rubies (50gp).  The other contains coin tithes (27gp, 45sp, 118cp).

Notes:

So with the first floor of the dungeon, I wanted to start establishing some of the themes – namely that this dungeon will focus heavily on the dead and religion.  I’ve also got some hidden information in here about the true nature of the enemies in this adventure (and astute gamers will recognize that the pattern is going to be for the Abbot to be the final boss at the end, because of COURSE he would be).  Personally, I don’t have a problem with cliché, per se, I have a problem with cliché used badly.  Tropes exist in fantasy and adventure design for a reason – it’s good shorthand to convey the information that the GM and players will need quickly.  I’d be any amount of money that if all I tell you is “the villain is a cultist pretending to be an abbot” that you’ve already got an image in your head of how you’d play that character.

This also gives us a chance to talk about my prose philosophy when it comes to writing adventures.  I’ve tried doing the old TSR style box text descriptions, and I honestly find it WAY too constricting.  So instead, for this adventure, I figure I’ll try out writing up my room descriptions more in tune with the way that I write my notes when I prep a session.  As you can see from the pic from my notebook, each room is one to three sentences, with all the pertinent info clear and easy, so I can elaborate at the table if I need to.

I’m also playing around with using DiY & Dragons Landmark, Hidden, Secret style of design (https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2019/10/landmark-hidden-secret.html).  In essence, the Landmark info is stuff the character see without needing to do anything, the Hidden is the stuff they find after exerting some small measure of effort, and the Secret is the stuff they have to really work at uncovering.  I’m still fiddling with exactly HOW to incorporate that into my design, but It’s a great way to structure my thoughts.

The other thing that I’m noticing, just as I write this blog post up, is that I’m finding it WAY easier for my own personal work flow to design in this more “stream-of-consciousness” style, without worrying about format or outlining or anything like that.  So I’ll keep working through the dungeon using this as my primary working document, and then when it’s time to format it up I’ll go back and do some polishing (and also once I get a chance to playtest it with my players.  Lord knows that always opens up some new things to change!).

We’ll leave it here for today then.  Next step, we head down into the depths, and enter the Ossuary of Morigan.