A Dungeon: The Pyramids of the Death Worshippers

Sometimes I have a simple, small idea that evolves into a dungeon. This one started with a mummy.

I am a big fan of mummies. Real mummies are interesting from a scientific perspective, and mummies in horror media are a fun compromise between reality and fantasy. The idea of a misunderstood ancient civilization that uses eldritch magic to raise desiccated bodies with contorted faces and sinister powers is interesting to me. Typically, mummies in horror are powerful: they possess mind control powers and can regenerate or must be killed in specific ways. This got me thinking about how going at a mummy with traditional medieval weapons will likely end badly for the adventurers.

So, what would happen if some adventurers tried to slash a mummy to death? My thought was that parts of the mummy would probably detach and, since there is dark magic at hand, continue moving and attacking the adventurers independently. If that was me, I would be frightened off my adventuring boots, so I decided to make the stat block, just for fun.

From there on, I kept adding layers to explain what civilization the mummy was originally from, what the intention of becoming a mummy was for, and where the mummy could be found. Eventually, I had a dungeon.

I've play-tested this dungeon a bit, and I really enjoyed it. I made some changes after that test and would like to test it a few more times just to see how the elements can interact in different ways under different conditions. I'll be setting up a few online games and see how that goes. I already made the dungeon on Shmeppy and have a few pre-mades ready to go. With that said, I would appreciate anyone interested in playing it with me. 

If you would like to participate in a playtest, leave a comment or message me.

Anyhow, here's the dungeon for anyone that wants to run a pyramid full of mummies.

Note: I wrote the stat blocks for a homebrew system, but they can easily be swapped for monsters from your favorite system (most compatible with OSE). Also, the PDF is bookmarked.

Cheers,


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A View on Inventory Management Methods Across Gaming Groups

Image
Inventory Management Methods - Poll Results Recently, I have been testing parts of a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) system that I'm developing by running a dungeon of mine ( Pyramids of the Death Worshippers ). This has been incredibly helpful by allowing me to see mechanics in action from different angles. One of those mechanics is slot-based inventory management. As many other TTRPGs, inventory management is a central part of my game. In my opinion, having a finite number of carrying capacity can set interesting challenges, from having enough rope to being able to carry all of the treasure you just found. There are various methods of managing inventory in TTRPGs, and ultimately it comes down to preference. Yet, it got me thinking about what method different groups are implementing. To get an idea, I ran four polls across TTRPG subreddits, including r/OSR, r/Shadowdark, r/RPG, and r/DnD (herein referred to as OSR, Shadowdark, RPG, and DnD, respectively). A table with the...
Read more

A Carousing Table

Image
  In chorus we sing of wine, sweet wine, Its power benign, and its flavor divine. -Bacchanalian, Francisco Martinez de la Rosa Some adventurers do it for the excitement, the glory, the treasure. In a profession where every day may be your last, life is lived to the fullest. So, when adventurers return carrying their fallen companions and bags of treasure, there is nothing left to do but to live your best life by carousing! Why did I make this? I needed a carousing table for the hexcrawl I’m running. The game is an amalgamation of mechanics, tables, and procedures that I’ve found interesting plus the weird ideas I’ve dreamt up. As such, there were carousing results that I wanted to have, such as MCC mutations. I also wanted to tie a better probability of getting something good with spending more. You may notice that lower results have more detrimental results than higher results. It was hard to find this, so I put one together. Note: In some instances I'm using third-party tables ...
Read more