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.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spaced Out Rides

(This is the kind of thing I'd have sent into Pyramid   back in the day, but that's not an option now, so here we are.)   The GURPS Action series is the gift that keeps on giving for a lot of modern-and-later gaming. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for sneaking around, running away, and all kinds of other activities which can be easily transplanted to cyberpunk and other high-tech settings. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides provides more of the same for its topic, giving an easy framework for describing and even designing common types of vehicles without all the math and paralysis-by-analysis of GURPS Vehicles. Pick a standardized vehicle type (van, compact car, etc.) and apply modifiers (rugged, tinted windows). But, of course, it’s limited. It’s just ten pages, after all, so it’s great for common passenger vehicles for the modern(ish) era. But higher-tech vehic...
Post a Comment
Read more

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Incense Trail prices

Over on the forum, somebody asked me how much frankincense and myrrh cost in antiquity. Well, we don't know. We never get as much price information as we like out of history. There's the occasional mention of this or that product being worth its weight in silver or gold, but we can reasonably believe that those are descriptions written by political, cultural, or philosophical commentators trying to give an idea of how expensive things are, not people who have actually done an economic analysis and discovered that the material in question is, by coincidence, exactly the same value as silver or gold and not, say, one and a half times the price of silver or three quarters of the price of gold. We know it was valuable, but not how valuable on the level of individual purchases. But for the convenience of the GM, we can use those comparisons to establish some ballpark figures. Mind you, this is based largely on GURPS rather than historical sources, so it's not something I would h...
7 comments
Read more

dVikingNames

This 2015 dissertation by Dr.  Paul Peterson  is the kind of gaming resource actual academia provides to us. The work contains a list of 517 Viking nicknames and their meanings. They start on p. 127 if you just want to skip ahead. Cool, no? Shane Ivey over on Bluesky suggested bringing a d517 to your next D&D game. And having a random table of Viking names is a great idea, actually. But. 517 doesn't break down into die rolls well. It's the product of two primes, and that does not translate into rolls on dAnythingyoumighthaveinyourdicebag. But its really close to 512, which is a straight-up power of two, and that you can roll. Indeed, if you just ignore the last five items on the list (sorry, enn ǫrvi, ǫrvǫnd, ǫrvǫndr, Øxna-, and øxnabroddr), you just need 3d8, or roll a d8 three times, treating each roll as a separate digit to generate one of 512 possible rolls and looking up the corresponding value. Roll, say, a 5, 7, and 1? That's 305, or lunan , meaning little blac...
Post a Comment
Read more