Today I’ll be continuing level 4 of my megadungeon, this one entitled “The Cyclopean Ruins.” In case you missed it, I’m basically trying to create a series of isolated environments, and then I’ll connect them with a mess of passages, overlapping encounter tables, etc.
For the first part, I’m just stocking the dungeon. I haven’t worked on this kind of thing in a while, so I’m getting back in the swing of things.
Here’s what I rolled:
- Special
- Empty
- Special
- Empty
- 6 Bugbears, no treasure
- Displacer Beast, no treasure
- Special
- Empty
- Special
- Yellow Mold + Special
- Empty
I want to start with the bugbears. Like many creatures in D&D, these guys are super stratified, but I’d like to go deeper and figure out something weird to do with them. I found this picture on the wikipedia page for Bugbears (horrifying) and this in a good Grognardia article about the history of D&D art. This is the direction I want to go with my bugbears in this section – folkloric, fae, Halloweeny. I also like this idea of bugbears being used to frighten children – what else can I do with that?
I’ll pause there and move on to the other monsters and the specials.
The displacer beast originates in a story by A.E. Vogt as a cat-like creature that devours the id of its prey. There’s definitely some kind of parallel to be drawn here between the bugbears preying on fear and the “coeurl” feasting on id energy. Are the two working together? Or have the bugbears trapped the creature here?
I think I’ll flip it and say the coeurl is actually the leader of the bugbears and make this a sort of halloweeny funhouse section. Mossy statues, overgrown walls, and pumpkin-headed freaks looming around every corner.
The final monster is yellow mold, which I’ve used in the Astral Prison layer as well. There I left it as a potential hook into some kind of rotting ecosystem on another level – let’s just do that again here and say this is a hole up towards another level. I think that means level two or three of this dungeon is going to be mold-themed. Sick as hell.
Now, our four special rooms. I’m going to crack into some other old books to find some inspiration here. Returning to my “Magic the Gathering Official Encyclopedia,” I found Floral Spuzzem, a card that, through some strange wording, seems to have free will. It also has great art. So one of our specials will be a strangely-sentient mass of vines with an appetite for magic items. It can be bartered with. Let’s put that in room 7
I’m also a sucker for a good water feature, and the Alliances art on Deadly Insect is really evocative for the vibe I want here. Maybe a pool filled with deadly insects – their sting inflicts a false death that renders its victim inert and imperceptible to the fear and id eaters that inhabit this level. Why do they keep them around? I don’t know! Let’s put them in room 9.
This leaves this strange central set of squares. I was considering doing some kind of monster nursery to flip the “bugbears scare children” on its head, but I don’t really want to get into “will the players kill babies?” But if the bugbears are creatures of pure fear and nightmare, maybe that’s alright. We’ll say that room 1 is a pumpkin patch, which the coeurl cultivates into bugbears by feeding them fear like they feed pumpkins milk to win the county fair.
I need a bit more inspiration for the final room, so lets roll some treasure, even just to get the wheels turning.
A +2 dagger. Perfect. The dagger is plunged into the back of a corpse that resembles one of the party members. It’s a trick to sow discord within the victims of this lair; make them think someone is going to betray them.
This leaves us with:
- A pumpkin patch, giant gourds nursed on fear to rise as bugbears.
- Empty
- A +2 dagger sunk into the back of a corpse that looks identical to one of the party members.
- Empty
- 6 Bugbears, no treasure
- Displacer Beast, no treasure
- A sentient and voracious mass of vines that eats magic items.
- Empty
- A pool of insects, their stings renders one in a false death.
- Yellow Mold + Special
- Empty
Next time, I’ll give the coeurl and the bugbears the Lee Gold treatment.