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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Stocking the Megadungeon - 1st level - monsters

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!

2 comments:

  1. 6 Ghouls vs. level 1 Charakters? Man... this will end in a TPK if not at least 1/2 the group are elves.

    What monster compendium(s) / handbooks(s) did you use?

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  2. Mostly I just used the Rules Cyclopedia.

    I'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.

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