This is the third in my series about stocking the first level of my megadungeon. This post deals with the monsters of the first level and the placement of the monsters in the dungeon itself. As I said before I decided to use my wandering monster chart to help determine who actually lives in my dungeon. For reference, here is the level 1 wandering monster chart.
Level 1
1 Bandit 1d6
2 Beetle, Fire 1d6
3 Centipede, Giant 1d6
4 Centipede, Giant 1d6
5 Darkmantle 1
6 Ghoul 1
7 Goblin 1d6
8 Green Slime 1
9 Gremlin 1d8
10 Kobold 2d6
11 Kobold 2d6
12 Lemure (devil) 1
13 NPC Party 1
14 Rats, Giant 1d3
15 Skeleton 1d10
16 Spider, Crab 1d2
17 Stirge 1d8
18 Wererat 1d2
19 Zombie 1d3
20 Zombie 1d3
Like I said last post, when I rolled a monster on the room contents chart I rolled on this chart to see what monster it would be. It ended up like this:
Crab spider x4
Darkmantle
Fire beetle x7
Ghouls x6
Green slime
Green slime
Gremlin
Kobolds x11
Lemure
Skeleton x6
Skeleton x8
Stirge x1
Stirge x4
Stirge x8
Wererat x2
Wererat x6
I also rolled 6 Traps, 3 traps with treasure, 4 unguarded treasures, and 4 special results. What to make of this? The stirges work best when they have access to the outdoors, so they'll go close to the entrance. The spiders, beetles, darkmantle, and green slimes can all be used anywhere in the dungeon as they're all unintelligent creatures/pests/vermin. The gremlin and the lemure are wildcards, weird things that can really mess with a party. That leaves me with the intelligent creatures - the ghouls, kobolds, and wererats. As an interesting note, the ghouls have a warhammer +3, the first and only magic item in the level!
Obviously the skeletons will hang out with the ghouls in their own corner of the dungeon. The wererats and the kobolds are both sneaky, and both probably afraid of the ghouls, which helps explain the traps. Aside from that I'm guessing that the kobolds and the wererats have come to an uneasy peace, with the kobolds highly on the defensive, lacking the ability to seriously hurt the wererats. I'm thinking that the vast majority of the kobold traps will involve fire or acid because of that, and that all of the traps with treasure were set by the kobolds to try to lure the wererats to their death.
Now that I have all that figured out, it's time to fill in the dungeon itself. Sorry for the formatting, but as you can see the first column is the room, the second was the roll it was associated with, and the last one is the room contents. You can see the map here.
Room Roll Contents
1 25 stirge x1
2 5 Skeletons x6
3 24 green slime 8,000cp, 3,000sp, 500gp, 4 gems
4 30 Ghoul x6 1,000cp, 4,000sp, warhammer +3
5 28 skeletons x8
6 6 Trap
7 9 Lemure
8 10 empty
9 11 trap
10 41 wererat x2 8,000cp, 4 gems
11 14 Wererat x6 2,000sp
12 12 trap
13 22 Trap
14 16 empty
15 15 treasure & trap 100sp, 20gp
16 18 empty
17 20 fire beetle x7
18 23 treasure & trap 200sp
19 19 empty
20 36 trap
21 7 Kobolds x11 4,000cp
22 37 stirge x4
23 34 treasure 400sp, 40gp
24 26 trap
25 27 stirge x8 4 gems
26 2 Special
27 8 empty
28 17 crab spider x4
29 4 empty
30 21 green slime 1,000sp, 1,000gp, 6 gems
31 35 Special
32 38 treasure 200sp, 5 gems
33 44 gremlin x1
34 43 empty
35 29 special
36 13 Darkmantle - 100sp, 50gp
Not used 40 Treasure 600sp, 40gp
Not used 1 Treasure 300sp, 10gp
Not used 3 Treasure 200sp, 60gp, 3 gems
Not used 32 Treasure & Trap 100sp, 50gp
Not used 31 special
Not used 33 empty
Not used 39 empty
Not used 42 empty
As you can see, I opted not to use 3 of the unguarded treasures, one of the specials, and one treasure trap combo.
I am a little worried about my results, as the wererats are invulnerable to normal weapons, and ghouls are very deadly. If they aren't careful it could easily end in a TPK.
There's still some more work to do on the dungeon, check back tomorrow to read about traps, special rooms, and to see the "finished" PDF!
6 Ghouls vs. level 1 Charakters? Man... this will end in a TPK if not at least 1/2 the group are elves.
ReplyDeleteWhat monster compendium(s) / handbooks(s) did you use?
Mostly I just used the Rules Cyclopedia.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little worried about it too, but they aren't unintelligent creatures, and while driven by an unholy hunger, they may stop to eat one party member, rather than chase the whole party through the dungeon.