Black Moors Waterways Room one
Happy New Year!
This year I will be participating in the Dungeon23 Challenge! This challenge created by Sean McCoy of Tuesday Knight Games encourages DMs and GMs of fantasy RPGs to get back to the basics and build a Megadungeon over the course of a year. Megadungeons are massive underground complexes full of monsters, traps, and treasure. They have been part of the fantasy RPG genre since the very beginning with Dave Arneson’s Castle Blackmoor and Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk. You may have also heard of legendary megadungeons like Undermountain or Dragon Mountain. They even appear in inspirational works like The Lord of the Rings’ Mines of Moria.
The rules of the challenge are straight forward. Draw and describe a dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023 - 365 rooms. Every week is a cluster of rooms, every month is a level of the dungeon. This results in 12 levels with roughly 30 rooms each.
For my dungeon, I will be detailing the Black Moors Waterways, a barely explored complex deep beneath the city of Black Moors in my campaign setting, Chronicle. Black Moors is obviously an homage to Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor and as such the first entrance is beneath Castle Black in the city.
The original challenge suggests hand drawing these in a journal, but I am choosing to draw these digitally so they are easier to share with you.
Black Moors Waterways - Level 1
The most common entrance into the waterways is through a secret door behind the sarcophagus of Lord James Black in the Crypt of Castle Black. Behind the door, a rough hewn staircase spirals down 30 feet to a large chamber. There is one exit from this chamber through an iron door to the west that is always locked (DC 17). The Lady Marissa of Black Moors and her advisor Rhys keep the only keys to this door. Behind it steps lead down to the next area.
The large chest against the south wall contains four bedrolls, 10 sealed clay jars of water, 10 days worth of hard tack wrapped in oil paper, one lantern, and 10 sealed clay pots of lamp oil. These provisions were placed here to use as a safe room in the event of a raid on the castle.
