Riding Into Battle by Destrier Studios

  THE BATHS AT BRINYELL For 3-6 characters, levels 2-4. System-agnostic, OSR-compatible. A hillside bathhouse, once famous, built over natural hot springs. Abandoned thirty years ago when the waters turned yellow and foul. Three groups occupy it now, none of them happy about the others. Hook: Gerta One-Hand, a former mercenary, sends word from the baths. She and her people (outcasts, lepers, the sick) settled there for the healing waters. The waters are getting worse. Something below is poisoning the source. She offers the party 200gp and free use of the baths (which do heal, when clean) to fix the problem. She cannot go herself. She has seven fingers between two hands and a cough that won't stop. FACTIONS Gerta's Band (Upper Level). Eight sick and desperate people led by a hard woman who won't beg. They've barricaded the stairwell. They want the water fixed. They will negotiate, trade information, and lend a hand if the party seems competent. They will fight if...

  THE BELLMAKER'S TOMB A dungeon for 3-6 characters of levels 2-4. System-agnostic, OSR-compatible. Oskar Vane made bells. He made the carillon in the Cathedral of St. Emmund. He made the harbor bell at Portmaw, the one sailors still use to time the tides. He made seventeen other bells across the Reach, and when he was dying he asked to be buried inside the largest bell he ever cast: a bronze monster, nine feet across at the mouth, never hung, never rung. His guild obliged. They dug a hole in the hill behind his workshop, lowered the bell in mouth-up, sealed him inside with his tools, and filled in the earth. That was sixty years ago. The hill has settled. The seal has cracked. And three expeditions have gone down into the bell in the last decade, drawn by rumors of Vane's tools (which could supposedly repair anything, even flesh) and the bronze fortune he was buried with. None of the three parties came back whole. The last one, four years ago, sent one survivor to the surf...

Nothing Here: On Empty Rooms, Rat Brains, and the Dread of an Unlocked Door Your dungeon has twenty rooms. Six have monsters. Four hold treasure. Two are traps. What goes in the other eight? Nothing. Or close to nothing. A smell, a stain, a chair with three legs. The room is there and the room is empty and the room is doing more work than anything with hit dice. I used to fill every room. I was twenty-two, running Keep on the Borderlands for people who had never played D&D, and I thought an empty room was a failure of preparation. So I crammed something into every ten-foot square. A goblin. A chest. A puzzle. The players moved through the Caves of Chaos like they were clearing a to-do list. Nobody was scared. Nobody hesitated at a door. Why would they? They knew what was behind it. Another thing to kill, another thing to take. The dungeon that finally taught me otherwise was Tomb of the Serpent Kings, which has rooms that are just rooms. Stone walls. A puddle. Maybe an old boot. Th...