Dungeon Building: The Sewers of Trefflyn

 

(c) Tale of the Manticore

As I mentioned in Episode 42, I decided to use elements of the rules-light RPG One Shot in the Dark to create my latest ‘dungeon’, also known as the Sewers of Trefflyn. This is the brainchild of Jon Cohen, aka Tale of the Manticore, who is one of the leading lights of this mini-genre of solo-roleplaying podcasts. Jon very kindly allowed me to showcase OSiTD for Stories From The First Watch.

The game is deliberately very simple, and acts like a basic version of a ‘choose your own adventure’ book, where dungeon rooms, foes and treasure are selected randomly, each created by drawing from a suit of regular playing cards. Each suite of cards represents a different element of dungeon design, for example, hearts represent the rooms of the dungeon, diamonds are the monsters or creatures, clubs represent the treasure, and spade is the Big Boss. As shown in Episode 42, for my first room, I drew a 7 of hearts, which was a treasure room.

I’m not playing the game in full, but rather I’m utilising this core mechanic to populate my dungeon with rooms to explore, enemies to encounter, and treasure to snaffle up. Obviously, because my dungeon is very much set in stone (or sludge) as a sewer system, I’m having to be creative with some of the room and creature descriptions, but on the whole it’s working very well, even with the occasional (literal) road block, such as the dead end also encountered in episode 42.

It’s a super easy system, and the game itself would be great fun for those with kids or friends who want to start out with TTRPGs.

I’m hard at work on episode 43, so soon you’ll be able to hear further examples of my use of One Shot in the Dark!