The world is pretty scary right now. You don’t need me to tell you that. Probably, you’re reading this from your house, where you’re supposed to stay put and spend time doing indoors activities. If you’re like the statistical majority of role-playing game fans, that’s probably not that much of an imposition for you. But, nonetheless, I want to spread cheer in these tough times and try to bring joy, gaming, and excitement to everyone out there in the tabletop traditional games hobby any way I can.

I got one day off this week, so I spent it making this for you all.

• It’s free.
• It may be good for one-shots. Or not. I don’t know.
• It’s a vaguely horror-themed, short dungeon with a little bit of exploration.
• It’s riding on the back of Ben Milton‘s simple, fun, OSR-compatible Knave system.
• It’s sorta borrowing from Nate Treme‘s Bestiary for Knave, at least until I started changing numbers.
• I did it with my cellphone (art), a desktop computer with Affinity Publisher (layout and writing all in one go), and the assistance of the free Sebaldus Gotisch and Crimson Text fonts.
• It’s CC BY-NC 4.0, specifically. Share it, do whatever, but don’t charge people for anything I’ve put together here, please. I’m trying to spread joy freely to the masses!

Originally this was my plan for a Halloween dungeon map ca. October 2018. I started whipping it up in like August but I sort of disappeared due to work difficulties around Halloween so it’s just been sitting here this whole time.

I kept listlessly poking at it but never had a great plan for it, so when I decided to make a COVID-19 freebie to justify playing around in Affinity Publisher today, I figured I should put it to good use. I thought a little on what I’d already imagined back then, added some extra bits and bobs, redrew it, and doodled up some other art. I kinda did layout and wrote everything in Publisher altogether first; then drew the grimoire, title, and map in that order – the map was last because I kept tweaking it as I pondered what I’d written.

I used Knave because I’ve been exploring it recently out of idle interest and developed an appreciation for its simplicity and compatibility. It’s a good excuse to add a Knave tag to this blog for future purposes, too, I’m sure!

Anyway, that’s how the sausage was made. It’s not fancy sausage, but maybe it’ll entertain you or your kids while you’re home waiting out the bad stuff. At some point I’ll stick it on DTRPG and Leanpub and Itch or something, maybe, but it’ll still be free.

Hopefully you all like it. Or at least some of you, anyway.

If you use it, let me know! I can be shouted at by email, in the comments down below, or over on Twitter as @DungeonsPossums – where I am slowly wearing a hole in my Samsung Note 9’s screen where the keyboard is displayed.