Skip to main content

The Occasional Dungeon: Crypt, Ground Floor, Part 1


The cave shrine is attached to a labyrinth-like crypt where various dead were laid to rest. Some had been noted holy men. Others were common people picked out for reasons lost to the depths of time. And some were very evil, stowed away in the supposedly safe confines of the crypt. But it's not so safe as one might hope. The crypt is full of magical power which has reanimated some of the dead, given an illusion of life to some objects, and let some things slip through the walls between worlds. Some time after the crypt was build and then sealed off by its makers, other monsters from the nearby natural caves broke in through a back entrance. Not long thereafter, they sealed it off again.

The crypt can be reached thorough concealed doors to the south through the cave shrine and to the northwest through the ground floor caves. The entire paved area is covered by the Silence spell (GURPS Magic, p. 171). It has somehow been applied to the entire volume on the crypt rather than on specific things in it, so it cannot be broken without destroying the entire crypt. All doors on this level are locked but can be picked with no penalty to Lockpicking skill. Secret doors can be found on a successful Search roll.

Every hour adventurer are in the crypt, roll a die. On a six, batch of wandering monsters come by. Roll 2d on the table below.


Roll Result
2-3 1.5 x N undead orc soldiers (orc soldiers are from Mirror of the Fire Demon, the undead lens is from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, p. 38)
4 N/3 stone golems (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2, p. 26) and N/2 undead ogres
5 2 x N undead dinomen (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, p. 11)
6 N undead orc soldiers, N undead dinomen, and N/3 undead ogres
7 N undead dinomen and N/4 toxifers (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2, p. 26)
8 N/2 stone golems and N undead dinomen
9 N undead gladiator apes (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, p. 17)
10 1 ciuacla (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, p. 7) and N/2 golem-armor swordsmen (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2, p. 24)
11-12 N/2 shadow warriors (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3, p. 21) and N/3 stone golems

Wandering monsters carry no treasure beyond any gear they carry.

Next time, the first several items on the key for specific rooms.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Briefly, How To Play GURPS

For a long time, I’ve maintained that GURPS, despite its reputation for complexity, is actually pretty simple in play. I was thinking recently that I should see if I can express the fundamentals of playing GURPS in a short, easily digested form, and so here I am.   This does not address a more general “how to play rpgs” for those who know nothing on the topic. How to approach GURPS, at that level, isn’t necessarily a lot different from how to approach D&D or TFT or any other RPG system. It doesn’t get into optional and campaign-specific sets of rules or equipment. Rather, this is stuff applicable to playing GURPS no matter what the campaign is. It also doesn’t address how to build GURPS characters, which is a vastly more complicated topic. Rather, this is about how to engage GURPS rules when you’ve already got your character sheet and are sitting at the table to play. It’s a trifle over 1000 words, which I think isn’t too bad.   How To Play GURPS Most of what you’ll need t...

More Nattering About Writing Historical RPGs

omeone made the mistake of asking me to expand on some things I'd said about writing historical rpg material, so you all must suffer for it. I write a lot of historical rpg stuff as well as entirely fictional setting material. So why make historically themed games rather than just making stuff up? Well, because it's an effective way of achieving the purpose of writing settings and adventures in general. The purpose of settings and adventures, I would aver, is to give players things to do in a convincing context. Convincing context doesn't necessarily mean realism. Players have different levels of understanding of what's "realistic" in different situations and are more or less sensitive to how closely those situations adhere to reality. For example, I'm a history and culture guy. Put me in SF campaigns (which happens with some regularity) and the specifics of how reaction drives, orbital mechanics, and subatomic physics work entirely escape me. I don't,...

Tour dCollection

I love dice.  It's a common affliction of gamers, but it's a particular thing for me. They're interestingly shaped, emblematic of my hobby, and modern ones are tiny works of art which appeal to even people like my non-gaming lovely and talented spouse (who has gotten me a great many of these over the years, because she knows what I like). I was recently asked about my dice collection, which has been accumulating for rather more years than I like to think, so here's a more or less historically guided tour. Back in The Olden Days (tm) of the first tabletop roleplaying games, polyhedral dice weren't easily available, nor were they initially sold as gaming accessories. They were originally sold as scientific equipment, used by people like statisticians and mathematical researchers who needed to generate random numbers (there's a fascinating paper here on the history of dice as randomizers in scientific work; the dice we use owe a lot to the reconstruction of post-w...