Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Twenty-One 21 Word Dungeon Rooms

Inspired by:
http://eldritchfields.blogspot.com/2021/11/ten-dungeon-rooms-21-words-each.html
http://eldritchfields.blogspot.com/2021/11/fifty-more-21-word-dungeon-rooms.html

1. Hunters' Cloakroom

Muddy footprints across the floor. Pelt coats hung on meat hooks, still wet. Damascene dagger worth 50 gp in a pocket.

2. Cryptic Grove

Gnarled leafless trees thrust up through the floor, prying bricks from the walls. Brittle, break at a touch, releasing hungry beetles.

3. Misplaced Mailroom

Torn-open letters scattered across desks and cabinets. One in ten contain useful info: troop movements, blackmail. Trivia in the rest.

4. Blackout Fountain

Malachite statue of jolly man sloshing liquid from his cup. Tastes like clean water, gets you drunk like strong liquor. Flammable.

5. Flagellants' Web

Withered corpses bound up in cats-o'-nine-tails obstruct the way. Remove a corpse's connections and it will animate furiously.

6. Cyclopean Staircase

Gargantuan pillar in center of room, carved with faint, spiraling steps. Those without depth perception can walk about these steps normally.

7. Flipping Pentagram

Silver pentagram painted on floor. Illusory demon chases those who enter toward the pentagram. Stepping on pentagram flips that floor section.

8. Tricksy Sauna

Full of thick, sweltering steam. Obscured team of goblins rearranges doors and loose planks to keep you trapped until heatstroke strikes.

9. Belly of the Beast (Constipated)

Grossly organic room. Digestive system organs hanging from ceiling, tubing on floor. Open sphincterish door by connecting them in correct order.

10. Bone Mill

Dusty air. Mill grinding bones to flour, pulled by snarling, carnivorous bulls. Bulls can charge, but only in a clockwise direction.

11. Warping Lens

Big glass orb built into dais. Dials around adjust its focus. Adjusted perspectives alter reality while viewed: magnify to enlarge, etc.

12. Hatter's Lounge

Furniture made of hats of various sizes. Full of maddening fumes. Needles, thread, felt, and a tub of mercury strewn about.

13. Execution Amphitheater

Wide open, wedge-shaped, marble steps. Acoustics concentrate sound. Any noise becomes deafening. Those on the corner stage take sonic damage.

14. Platform Pond

Algae-clouded pool holding koi buoyant enough to walk on, attracted to food yet startled by sudden splashes. Beneath, megasnakeheads lurk.

15. Fearsome Effigy

Claw-rent alcove holding petrified beast, its eyes carved with X's. Monsters cringe from its sight. Sleeping nearby brings restless nightmares.

16. Chthonic Oracle

Rift with nerve-tendril protruding from deeper than light's reach. Attachment casts Commune, answers are disturbing, drops connectee to zero hp.

17. Work In Progress

Room is incomplete, full of animated scaffolding. Scaffolding will snatch loose stuff with spindly limbs to construct the rest of it.

18. Lilliput Terrarium

Within are skeletons, tiny jungle, and a tribe of micro-humans. Lingering causes your soul to leave your body in minuscule form.

19. Being Gog Magogovich

Shaped like inside of skull. Portholes display vision of giant warlord, similar features for other senses. Tonguish protrusion controls his speech.

20. Time Capsule

Metallic, ovoid, hums unpleasantly. Time within runs 100 times slower. A legendary hero lives within, wants news but won't ever leave

21.The Goose Room

Plastered with parchment, puddles of ink about. A goose with inverted quills waddles around, writing autonomic poetry. Valuable, but hates humans.

4 comments:

  1. Definitely keeping this one to fill bizarre haunted houses and those rooms on maps that you don't really know what to do with but the players will inevitably explore anyway.

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  2. This format is secretly genius. The twenty-one word limit is almost magically perfect: it prevents extreme terseness AND wordiness and practically enforces the "concept-detail" two-sentence format.

    But there's more. The "twenty-one word" thing is actually a lie: most of the above are 23-word dungeons, some 25 or 26 or even more... because the title, of course, is part of the room, but limited in an altogether different way: instead of adhering to a word count it must look and FEEL like a title. This pretty much subverts the downsides of the 21 word format while retaining its benefits. Instead of counting, you can actually graphically and intuitively see if the title is fair or the writer is a WALKING, TALKING SCAM and FRAUD worthy of STRICT universal REPROOF >:(

    And look at the perfect results. The 21 rooms above are all great, and practically everything linked at the beginning of the article is just as cool. Both writers are proven amazing, but the seemingly silly form is clearly helping a lot.

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