Creating the dungeon, part 1
Prolific dmsguild author M. T. Black has a contest up for Ghosts of Saltmarsh. The concept: “write a single page dungeon loosely tied to the module”. Winner gets a cash price and contestants can upload their adventures on their own later.
I’ve teamed up with a friend to give it a shot. Today we had an initial brainstorming session. The goal: to gather all of our high concept ideas, pick the ones we like, and form a loose narrative.
Interesting side-note is that both of us know nothing about Ghosts of Saltmarsh except for the blurb on the WotC website.
Here’s the raw notes from that session:
Ghost of Saltmarsh Ideas
- Massive wheel-like entrance that splits the party
- Haunted lighthouse
- Zombie pirates
- Sahaguan cult
- Seaside cliffs
- Day at the beach
- Cthulhu stuff
- Kraken
- House in the marsh that fogs up
- Creeping through the fog
- Flooded village, with a hag of course
- Wizard messed up
- Twist
- Yearly thing, tied to lighthouse
- Shipwreck
- Mindflayer
- Island that is a monster
- Notre dame situation
- Were-things
- Bullywugs
- Ettercaps & Giant spiders
- Overfishing
- Guardians of the sea
- Alien submarine
- Underground cave system
- Treasure map from a pirate
- Evil swamp tree Gulthias tree?
- Creepy swamp forest
- Man-spider
- Creepy narrow gaps in caves
- Legendary item or something
- Trident?
- Pearl of power
- Sea crown
- Folding boat (why not sentient!)
Quick writeup
Flooded village in the swamp. Inhabited by a wizard and his wife, whose magical experiments went wrong and caused the flooding. The wizard turned into an ugly man-spider and the wife was already a demented hag and she planned the whole thing! The reason for their magic was to increase prosperity, irrigation, soil enrichment. The wizard is still sort of helpful in his own spoopy way. It’s quite foggy.
Introduced by an old man who talks about the old village of Goodhollow who says something like “when I were a lad my mother would take me over, fishermen with their pearls and fish. Of course it’s flooded now. They say that he was killed by the horrible man-spider haunts the ruins.”
Bullywugs are trying to get in. There is a thing. The man-spider has spiders to fight them off. The wizard’s crystal is causing spoopy fog as well. Heart of the Swamp. It’s the heart of a kraken.
Man-spider’s citizens are ettercaps and there are giant spiders as cattle.
Mystery: what happened to the village, what is the evil man-spider? Heart of the Swamp?
Lawful good goal:
Loot: Heart of the Swamp?
Locations
- Village outside
- Flooded
- Ettercaps & Spiders
- Use a boat?
- Fog
- Wizard’s Mansion
- Man-Spider lives here
- Ettercap “assistants”
- Bullywug camp
- Kuo-toa archpriest as boss (reskinned)
- They’re after the heart of the swamp
- Petrified Kraken
- Heart of the Swamp in it
- With magical doodads
- Entrance is mouth
- Hag’s nest