So, the little RPG publisher I created to release the stuff I make, Moon Baby Games, released our first product last month, a mini-adventure for Shadowdark (or other OSR games) that sees the PCs delving into an underground dwarven fortress called an osrok (a name unique to my own fantasy setting, where my upcoming novel Seed of the Black Oak takes place).

It’s pay-what-you-want and you can nab it on DriveThruRPG. I’m not going to pretend it’s the most amazing mini-dungeon ever, but I think I did a nice job with it and I want to talk about it here.

First–I’ve been making dungeons for many, many years, but this is the first one I’ve ever made with the intention of releasing commercially. So, I had to think more about its design, accessibility, layout, etc. That was an interesting exercise.

Also, the format–what I’m calling a 2-page dungeon–is something I want to really latch onto for future releases. So I want to talk about that.

Osrok of the Dwarf Marauders

First, let’s talk about the adventure itself, right out-of-the-metaphorical-box.

It’s a 1-level dungeon populated mainly by dwarven fighters, although there’s also an undead dwarf priest the PCs might raise, and a very powerful earth elemental guarding the back door. There are potentially 5 ways of getting into the fortress (although 2 would require the GM to do a little more work).

My design philosophy with modular adventures like these is to give referees tools for their toolboxes, or weapons for their arsenals. I’m not trying to write a tightly-plotted adventure, I’m trying to create a situation and then let groups make an adventure out of it.

So there isn’t a default plot or objective. There’s a situation–dwarves have taken over this fort and are using it to raid some villages below. This could be dropped into a hexcrawl; something that a group of PCs can learn about and then decide whether or not to get involved; a setpiece in an ongoing campaign revolving around any kind of war involving dwarves; or a total one-shot to run when you’re just trying to get a quick session in.

With that in mind, I could focus on verisimilitude when designing, and not have to heavily gamify anything to ensure that the PCs have a good shot at “winning” (or at least having a narratively satisfying climax). That’s the referee or GM’s job; my job is to give them some tools to do so with.

So while the map itself is designed to be an engaging dungeon with multiple paths, secrets, and connections, I always made sure logic came first. They have to have a barracks to sleep in; they have to have a storage area; there should be a method for the captain to escape his quarters; etc.

These considerations led to the creation of the concept of an osrok, which used the dwarven word for “fort” in my own fantasy setting (the only element that’s not setting-neutral) to describe a military outpost that is literally cut into the side of a mountain. This seemed like a natural fit for dwarves, but not enough to make an engaging dungeon all on its own.

I had been reading about the phenomenon of Japanese holdouts after WW2 and thought the concept would be really interesting to explore in a fantasy campaign. So in my own games I have a scenario involving a collapsed dwarven kingdom that tried, and failed, to conquer its neighbors. Remnants of this kingdom are still desperately holding onto their mountain osroks, refusing to accept that reinforcements from their king are not coming.

However, that’s too specific and constraining for what’s supposed to be a modular, setting-neutral adventure.

So all the holdout stuff went into a “potential backgrounds” section on page 2–the suggestion is there, but it’s optional.

Otherwise, I tried to include a good mix of different challenges within the dungeon. The dwarves are the primary combat encounter, but there’s also that big earth elemental in the back–definitely more powerful than the PCs in this adventure are likely to be, but it can be sneaked around or defeated with clever tactics. There’s also the undead priest–he’s not really aligned with the dwarven fighters, so provides a different flavor if the PCs wake him up.

Otherwise, there’s a secret door that mixes lore and mechanics; twisty tunnels with rough terrain that give the dwarves a natural advantage; and plenty of secrets to find. I also tried to build in some objectives besides “kill everyone,” especially since the enemies here are tough; my original playtest gave the PCs the mission of stealthily mapping out the dungeon so that a real military unit could go clear it out later.

So that’s the rundown of what this adventure is like. Let’s look at the challenges that came up in achieving this design.

Make it Modular

There’s a lot of stuff you have to do when creating a dungeon or adventure that’s meant for more than just your personal gaming group.

(By the way, in case you don’t know, modular here means that something is meant to be easily removed from or added to different campaigns or settings.)

I love modular adventures and use them frequently. When I run sandbox or hexcrawl games, I love to be able to just grab a dungeon and throw it in somewhere so my players always have something to find and do.

But these inevitably require work from me as a GM. I have to change names, tweak encounters, make it fit in with the lore of my world. It’s much less work than creating from scratch, obviously, which is why it’s worth it, but I wanted to create something that requires as little work on the GM’s part as possible.

Osrok’s primary adversaries are dwarves, which are almost always a potential PC ancestry. I will admit that I have a preference in my RPGs for fighting humanoid, or at least intelligent, enemies, like bandits, soldiers, mercenaries, raiders, whatever. There’s a lot of inherent ethical and moral stickiness with the default RPG mode of play that involves lots of combats to the death, but in general I find it easier to swallow if I’m fighting enemies with at least human-level intelligence. Unless a setting really does a lot to distinguish “monsters” from animals, it feels pretty icky to go out slaying wyverns or basilisks or giant spiders or gnolls or whatever. Really, what makes a gnoll more deserving of death than say, a bear?

Human-esque enemies come with issues of murder and colonialism, but if the story is written well then you have a decent, diegetic reason to be fighting and killing. Your foes consciously chose to be evil, or you’re roleplaying being part of a complex conflict with gray morality and these types of questions are the point. Much less thorny than the glorified trophy-hunting that a lot of “slay-the-monster’ scenarios boil down to.

So adventures I write tend to have some kind of evil humanoid faction as the primary antagonists. Bandits, soldiers, mercenaries, cops, whatever.

I chose dwarves for this one because I don’t see them get used as enemies very often, and because I don’t have that much of an interest in them normally, so I wanted to challenge myself to make something cool with dwarves.

I feel like I only half-succeeded there. While I think there’s a lot a good GM could do to make this small dwarven faction cool (and I did when I ran it as playtesting), to keep the adventure as setting-neutral and sparse as possible, they don’t really seem very cool as dwarves in the module-as-written. There’s some suggestions for dwarven lore to use, but to avoid making it so this adventure felt too specific, they kind of just have to be nearly-blank-slate bad guys.

It’s a double-edged sword here–it’s more work for the GM to “color” the scenario; if they want their NPCs to be more than “generic evil bad guys” then they have to put in that work. On the other hand, if you’re just looking for a prepped, stocked dungeon that you can slot into your own setting or scenario, it’s less work than having to reshape a lot of lore or detailed NPC information.

So who do I appeal to–the GM who likes to control their own lore and setting, and just wants a barebones dungeon that they can “color” themselves? Or the GM who doesn’t care as much about consistent lore and settings, and prefers more detail?

I opted for the former, because it’s what I want as a GM. You can never please everyone, and I am a firm believer that when creating any kind of art, it’s best to create the kind of art that you want to exist.

I like to control my own setting and lore. I like to roleplay my NPCs based on how I’m feeling that day, or what helps me achieve the tone and feeling I’m going for. So a module with a lot of well-defined NPCs, specific locations, deities, and/or lore is a module that I, personally, am less likely to use.

So paradoxically I ended up making this module more generic. I included the word, osrok, because that’s something that can trivially be dropped, adopted, or replaced in other settings. Other than that, this adventure works in almost any fantasy setting.

Product Identity

Moon Baby Games is intended to be a side-hustle that I maintain and build for as long as I’m mentally able to. While I’m not intending it to become my day job and don’t think it will ever take the RPG world by storm, I do want it to move towards having a sense of brand and product identity, as well as a “house style.”

Such things can never spring forth fully formed from a creator’s brow, like Athena from Zeus. They’re things that we move to over time.

But since I do want to be moving in that direction, I had to think about it.

First was the format–I wanted this to be a 2-page-dungeon, a format I’m intending to make a hallmark of the things I release commercially. While I love 1-page-dungeons, and frequently drop them into my games, they do often leave me with a little more work than I’d like.

Expanding the concept to 2 pages feels like it gives a huge return on investment. It’s very little in terms of bloat or load or even page-count–if you print double-sided, it all still fits on a single sheet of paper.

In return, you can have key descriptions that are a little more detailed, and I was able to include all the goodies like adventure hooks, background suggestions, roleplaying notes, etc. that there just isn’t room for in a one-pager.

Now I’ll be the first to tell you that I suck at art. I’m just not a terribly visual person; my brain is much more drawn to narrative, forward motion, and possibility space than it is to trying to capture a single moment in time, which is what static artwork fundamentally is. (And I’m not throwing shade; I envy and admire 2d artists to a degree I can’t even describe.)

So I was never going to move units based on pretty artwork. I commissioned our logo, which I love, but other than that the actual visuals of the module (basically just the dungeon map) are spartan, workmanlike, practical.

Line-editing and doing the layout was a tough process–I spent several hours agonizing over every word, every margin, every pixel. I wanted as much useful info as possible, but also know that info ceases to be useful if it’s presented in a jumbled, unreadable mess. I think I did a decent job here. It’s not going to win me any awards, certainly, but it gets the job done, which is what I was hoping for for a first attempt.

I also think I succeeded at establishing the precedent I want to follow for future releases. First page–dungeon map and key. Second page–roleplaying notes, adaptation suggestions, backgrounds, and stat blocks if any are necessary. So you could use it as a 1-page dungeon if truly necessary, but that 2nd page packs a lot of material that I find helpful with these types of products.

I’m already working on a couple follow-ups, including one involving time-travel to a stone-age fantasy setting, with dinosaurs and cave-elves; and another that’s a sort of locked-room mystery (I may have just seen Wake Up Dead Man). I don’t know if I’ll do full design breakdowns for every one I do, but I will if there’s demand. In the meanwhile, if you’re a GM looking for short content to add to your hexcrawl or west marches campaign, stay tuned!