u/cuernoblanco

I made a 16-room Electric Bastionland dungeon about a theatre that has been performing the same play for three years

I've just released A Night at the Gallows Theatre, an Electric Bastionland adventure.

The premise:

A mysterious theatre has been performing the same unnamed play every week for three years.

There are no reviews.
No records of the performers.
No one remembers buying tickets.

The PCs, however, have tickets with their names on them.

And they're not there to watch the performance.

The adventure grew out of an actual Electric Bastionland campaign I ran, where one of the characters became indebted to the Gallows Theatre. I liked the idea enough that I eventually turned it into a full location.

The other big influence was the very simple dungeon design approach used by Chris McDowall: a relatively small number of interconnected rooms that give players plenty of opportunities to choose their own path.

And, inevitably, once I decided to make it a mysterious early-20th-century theatre, my brain went straight to The King in Yellow, Call of Cthulhu, Pelgrane's games, and even Arkham Horror also found their way into the inspiration pile.

The result is 16 rooms divided between Front of House, Stage, Backstage, and Understage.

It's available for free here:

👉 https://cuernoblanco.itch.io/a-night-a-the-gallows-theatre

I'd be particularly interested in hearing from other Electric Bastionland referees: what makes a good EB dungeon/location for you?

I turned an in-joke from my DCC campaign into a dwarven astronomy book

This started during my weekly DCC game.

Our Judge showed us a moon stone, and my character immediately improvised the existence of the Moon Dwarves, an ancient ancestor race from which all dwarves supposedly descend.

Then another player, Elbo the Elf, decided to explain the occasional appearance of new stars: apparently halflings are flying around in enormous balloons, poking holes in the sky and selling updated navigation charts.

The joke kept coming back in our sessions.

So I eventually turned it into a proper piece of lore.

The Astronomicon Dwarfica is an in-universe dwarven compendium covering:

• Moon Dwarf creation mythology
• Dwarven theories about the stars
• Constellations and their prophecies
• Astrological rituals
• Salt Dwarven whalers and shipwrights
• The vanished Moon Dwarves
• Dwarven superstitions
• Scholarly arguments and contradictory traditions
• And, naturally, the Great Cartographic Conspiracy

It's system agnostic, although DCC was the original inspiration.

It's also Pay What You Want on itch.io.

https://cuernoblanco.itch.io/the-astronomicon-dwarfica

I wrote the whole thing as if it were a translated dwarven manuscript, complete with different authors, annotations and increasingly questionable footnotes.

If anyone wants to know why Elbo the Elf is apparently an authority on dwarven astronomy, I can explain. 😄