Castle Pendalton: D1.1, The Deep Cellars (Part 1/2)

So our first section is the Deep Cellars. This is going to be the main entrance of the dungeon. It's basically an abandoned set of storerooms deep beneath the castle. Wide corridors, loading bays, warehouses, some small office rooms, stacks of big crates. That kind of thing. Mostly, it's been plundered into oblivion, but there are a few treasures still there - mostly on the corpses of dead adventurers. As such, there are mostly scavenger sort of monsters here. I'm thinking giant rats on the easy end, giant web spiders on the difficult end, and giant centipedes in the middle.

There are a few different kinds of rooms here:

• Hallways - these are wide, empty zones designed to help the players get from one area to the other fairly easily. The further the other rooms are from the hallway, the more likely they are to have good treasure.
• Undercrofts - this is a sub-type of the hallways that basically adds some extra support to the ceiling at major intersections. There are sometimes maps on the wall with a little you are here, but they are ancient. The lobby is basically an undercroft with a busted wall where the players first gain access to the dungeon. It'll have multiple hallways leading off in different directions, to provide the players an immediate choice of where to go.
• Stairwells - these are simple functional stairs to the first floor of the castle (these are mostly blocked) and down to the various sublevels of B2 (which are not).
• Warehouses - these are bigger rooms just off the main halls, which are more likely than most to house monsters and interesting treasure.
• Offices - these are smaller areas off the halls and the warehouses that are more likely to house useful clues and information. They also make good monster dens.
• Storage Closets - these are really tiny sections off the main halls that most likely contain interesting trash and mundane equipment like ladders and carts.
• Latrines - these are located off the main hall and are exactly as labeled on the tin. There is access to the dungeon's drainage systems here.
• Tunnels - these are burrowed into the walls by rats and beetles and such to creature monster dens. The dens usually have a larder which may contain corpses and treasure.

Next, we have a few specific needs for rooms in this area. First and foremost: we need a dungeon lobby. It's critical to the structure of this dungeon. Next, we'll need some kind of landmark on the way to the next area where the plants start to overtake the dungeon. From the moment I came up with the idea this area, a core image in my mind has been a warehouse full of crates, some which the party searches only to find that they have stuck their arm into a horrible giant centipede nest. I also want to have a secret area tunneled into the wall that provides a sneaky shortcut between several areas, but all the tunnels go straight through a giant rat den. There also needs to be a sealed stairway up to the above-ground levels of the castle.

That said, we'd be crazy not to use a little random generation to speed things up. I use the following table for stocking my dungeons, and we'll be rolling 1d8 among the bullet points above for the room types. I'll be tweaking the results a bit to swap in the rooms we know we need for results that were closest to them. The reason we're doing that is to preserve the overall ratio of room types. We'll fill in the actual details of the rooms in the next post.

General Dungeon Stocking Table (d100)

1-6        Treasure

7-33      Empty

34-40    Trap and Treasure

41-50    Trap

51-67    Special (usually no treasure)

68-83    Monster

84-100  Monster and Treasure

Here's the results of the rolls.

Dungeon rooms:
Storage Closet: Treasure
Storage Closet: Empty
Undercroft: Empty
Stairwell: Empty (Sealed, to F1)
Storage Closet: Empty
Undercroft: Empty
Latrine: Empty
Undercroft: Empty
Hallway: Empty
Warehouse: Empty
Office: Monster
Storage Closet: Monster
Stairwell: Monster (Open, to B2)
Tunnel: Monster (Rat Lair)
Warehouse: Monster (Giant Centipede)
Office: Monster
Storage Closet: Monster
Undercroft: Monster and Treasure
Office: Monster and Treasure
Tunnel: Monster and Treasure
Latrine: Monster and Treasure
Office: Special
Hallway: Special (Main Lobby)
Hallway: Special
Undercroft: Special
Undercroft: Trap and Treasure
Warehouse: Trap and Treasure
Stairwell: Trap (Open, to B2)
Tunnel: Trap
Warehouse: Trap

Next step is to put actual stuff in the rooms, and after that we'll sketch out a map and distribute the locations onto it.