I’m delighted to share that I have now completed the first keyed zone of the Drowned Labyrinth, the megadungeon at the heart of my new West Marches campaign. If you’ve been following the campaign-building series, this is the level I’ve been sketching out over the last few posts, now fully written up and ready for the table.
The Unfinished Halls are a flooded gallery of marble statues and classical architecture. Why the construction was abandoned is a mystery. My main inspirations here are Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, the Cove from Darkest Dungeon, and the ancestral tombs along Azura’s Coast in Morrowind: eerie, echoing, endless, and weirdly alive.
Over on my Patreon you’ll find 25 keyed locations, a wandering encounter table, a rumour table, and something hopefully quite new: a player-driven water level system, where two ancient machines work against each other to raise and lower the tide across the whole zone, opening and closing access to different areas as the party experiments. The cast of characters is also fun (I hope): a wretched cult listening for the voice of their imprisoned god, a Harryhausen medusa who hunts the flooded corridors, and the ghost of a cartographer who just wants to finish his map.
This module is written for Old-School Essentials and assumes a party of six to eight characters of 2nd or 3rd level. It’s very much designed for exploration-focused play rather than constant combat. Expect long stretches of quiet, punctuated by moments of strangeness and real peril.
Patreons can download it for free! If you enjoy it, I’d love to hear about it. Drop a comment below, or let me know how your players fared.
There’s much more of the Labyrinth to come . . .
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