The OSR needs more products that are small adventure sites you can scatter across a campaign setting of a given tone. Kind of like the AD&D Lairs books or something like 2e's Country Sites but you know... better written.
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I've written a bunch of one pagers for this reason, and I'd love to make more. My own campaign is just an island filled with a tonne of my favorite small adventures (one pagers, quests form Dungeon Magazine) etc. that make up a little world of adventure no matter where you turn :)
Axian Library have a product called Lands of Legends: Encounters and Locations organised by the type of environment.
I paired an entry from Locations with one from Events, and seeded my Borderlands map with them. Has provided the potential for years of gameplay alongside the actual adventures we use
He certainly does: Haunted Almanac is a treasure trove. The tone tends to be an excellent mix of the whimsical, gonzo and bathetic. (It also includes the game In the Light of a Ghost Star, which I really want to play more)
Single delve, probably no more than 6 or 7 rooms.
Less factional play within a dungeon, but perhaps factional interplay between dungeon sites.
1 cool treasure that's in demand nearby.
No more than 3 "combat encounters".
Comes with a treasure map that you can give your players in another hoard.
I tend to categorize these as "Lairs" in my games. Did a dozen for Dolmenwood here: https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2023/12/dolmenwood-dozen.html some of them are a little bit "interlinked" but I definitely love the idea of Treasure Maps pointing to other ones!
I more meant that if you write a lair you should include a map *to it* so that a potential referee can build a portfolio of treasure maps to hand out whenever they roll one for loot. Although putting a treasure map in all of your mini dungeons so they chain together endlessly could be cute.
Gotcha! I do think that one can never have enough back-pocket Treasure Maps though! They are rather *common* given the Treasure Distribution in some of the older presentations (and my quick/hasty scrawls at the table aren't always works of art!)
In World Maps are very effective Rumor-dispensers!
Exactly. If the goal is to make the lair as useable as possible then including a map to it just gives the red another way to point the players at it. Diegesis, yada, yada...
"Vanilla but good" was a guiding star for my Dungeon23 (which will finally see release around February?!!) but that's a megadungeon. So, my next stuff will be smaller.
Though I always have the problem of like... if there's not something Special about it then why is it worth selling but then if it's Special it gets harder to work in to a setting like that.
No I agree. It’s like a very fine line that is pretty hard to walk. I want good, not boring. But I don’t want super weird, but I do want specific. These are just hard haiku type dungeons/lairs to make.
I've been picking through the BFRPG and Dragonsfoot stuff this year and it's really striking how hard it is to get out of the rut to make vanilla stuff more interesting
I don't particularly care for the no artpunk deal but the challenge "make a good adventure with minimal bespoke elements" is good
Well, Goodman Games just produced a 2-Page Delve book featuring creatures from their Dungeon Denizens book, which is a collection of mini-lairs fior drop-in use. And I'm updating my One Year in The Savage AfterWorld book of mini-adventurss for MCC right now.
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I paired an entry from Locations with one from Events, and seeded my Borderlands map with them. Has provided the potential for years of gameplay alongside the actual adventures we use
I also believe that ManaRampMatt & Highland Paranormal Society are great creators of fun, tiny locations to explore
The existence of one such product doesn't mean that there's enough of them though!
Less factional play within a dungeon, but perhaps factional interplay between dungeon sites.
1 cool treasure that's in demand nearby.
No more than 3 "combat encounters".
Comes with a treasure map that you can give your players in another hoard.
In World Maps are very effective Rumor-dispensers!
I don't particularly care for the no artpunk deal but the challenge "make a good adventure with minimal bespoke elements" is good