Creative Acquisition

The party has delved into the dangerous Temple of Vengeance, a tomb for a group of long dead heroes that once saved the world from a snake cult. They have arrived at the Tinker’s workshop and one of his remnant iron golems has activated, threatening the party with death via monk punching.

Sir Robin, bard extraordinaire, hurriedly attempts to disguise himself as the Tinker himself, creator of these golems. In his haste, and lacking knowledge of what the Tinker looked like, he transformed himself into a murloc instead. The golem was not amused.

Steal as many dungeon ideas as you can.

This past weekend featured the Fourth of July, otherwise known as Summer Christmas and America’s Birthday. In honor of this auspicious day I created a dungeon with what I felt was a patriotic theme. The players had to fight through a room of berserk curses, a chamber of pure spiders, a room of living suits of armor, a hallway with a serious arrow fetish, the wrath of a storm goddess, and the star shaped room of a heroine.

It was Avengers themed with minor tweaks to throw my friends off, but they had a hoot and it took them a good long while to figure out what I was up to. Of course, once they reached the one-eyed black dragon named Furaxis at the end, all subtlety was lost. I’m clever, not subtle.

Here’s my point, patient reader: I … “creatively borrow” as many concepts for my dungeons as possible. I’m not looking to reinvent the wheel. The wheel is doing a really good job. Writers have been coming up with incredible ideas, artifacts, traps, punishments, rewards, etc. for hundreds of years. I sure love tweaking them in my favor.

How do you do this, you ask? Good question. You should feel proud for having asked that. It’s fairly easy. Allow me to offer you this list:

• Comic book heroes make for interesting room themes. The room I made for Black Widow was a room of pure magical darkness that swallows light, revealing only a pair of daggers at the center of the room taunting you with their potential extra shock damage and 1 round stun. High above were spiders. Sooooo many spiders. At no point does a redhead show up and start power murdering people, but the concept comes across and I came up with a challenging room that my players conquered creatively (bard mesmer is OP) and then ran far from because spiders.

• Magical weapons and armor have existed for thousands of years. Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, has been around since the Dark Ages. Its scabbard protects the bearer from being cut and its blade can best any other. Together they are powerful relics. Steal it, twist it, make it your own. Name it Callandor and place it in a fortress called the Stone (wait that’s from something …). Tone down the scabbard’s power and make it resistance to slashing weapons. There are more magical weapons out there than your players have heard of and I bet they will enjoy a reference that makes them more powerful.

• The internet. Seriously just … just look at it sometime. It’s really great. You can pretty much search anything in the entire world and Google will just drop it at your feet. Need traps? Search ‘em. Need a name generator? There are about fifty. Don’t feel like drawing your own dungeon map? Oh, I’m sorry, that’s the one thing they don’t -- WAIT -- of course they have that and also randomizers and digital graph paper for people who hate pencils. Even if all you have is the basest beginning of a concept you can find it on the internet.

• Science Fiction can be converted. Technology = magic. The first villain I ran for my players in this One-Shot-Verse (that’s what we call it, don’t kink shame) was a modification of a Warhammer 40K Techpriest that I occasionally use. I made his mechanical replacements alchemical and aberration in nature and I turned a Techpriest into a terrifying wizard gone wrong. Starships become sailing vessels. Planets become islands. Teleporting becomes … well it can still be teleporting but there are probably doves or something. Wizards need a bit more showmanship anyway. Star Trek contains millions of good plots for a seafaring campaign that you can tweak. Star Wars is structurally based on a samurai movie. Convert it back and season with dragons.

• Westerns are perfect one-shot plots. Read or watch a western sometime and you will acquire the following: a good villain, downtrodden villagers, incredible set pieces, strong motivation for characters of all alignments, and grit. Lots of grit. Tweak it. Throw in some castles and dragons and make the villainous gunslinger a sorcerer with two wands who slugs it out toe to toe with your party’s wizard in a wizard-fight to shatter the ages. High noon becomes midnight if you want to make it even better.

What’s my one rule? Steal as many dungeon ideas as you can.