Behind The Screen #1: “Into the Depths of Kreüger Castle”
Thank you so much for signing up for the Wayward Beacon newsletter! I couldn’t be more excited to finally share Into the Depths of Kreüger Castle (IDKC) after spending months and months working on it. The goal of this article is to share that journey, not only for myself, but for anyone who finds the creative process interesting. So sit back and let me take you from concept to completed book. The only qualm is, I’ve never written a blog before, so bare with me as I learn by doing. Just like with IDKC!
The idea came from wanting to run an adventure at my bachelor party. I got married in December 2024 and my bachelor party was in October, at a cabin in the woods. The perfect gaming setting. The original adventure idea was going to be heavily influenced by Big Trouble Little China, and kick off with the king of the land, Camthron (no relation), being kidnapped from his wedding by the evil wizard Archenemon. All of our heroes would be members of the wedding party and the hook is Queen Hanora tearfully begging them to go and rescue the King, before it was too late.
Things quickly got out of hand, and my goal for a one shot grew and morphed into a 5 tiered dungeon, with 30 plus encounters, multiple factions, and ample ways to engage with all three pillars of the game. Escape from the Halls of Annihilation (EFHA) is the current working title, but is subject to change. I’ll go further into this adventure later in this article, but it was important for me to change up what I was doing and put EFHA on ice and find something more manageable that I could cut my teeth on if I wanted to meet my self imposed deadline. This might have been the most productive idea I’d ever had. Make it smaller and your chances of actually finishing it sky rocket. How novel.
Que In the Cavernous Depths of Kreüger Keep the original title before I changed it to Into the Depths Kreüger Castle because I felt if was more fantastical, mysterious, and most importantly had a call to action in it. The hook is in the title, it pretty much says “Go Down the Tunnel in Kreüger Castle,” which I like, players can use some direction. While the adventure can be completed in a single session, I think two sessions is a better pace. Especially if you’re making characters at the table.
When it comes to the story of the adventure, I’m a sucker for the classic scenarios. A human settlement thinks demons have dug their way up from below to kill them all, while really the Talpa (which means Mole in Latin) are just running for their lives. The humans, and therefore the player characters (PCs), don’t yet know about the pissed off Raptarrians who were just burgled by the Talpa. It was important to me that there be multiple factions with multiple perspectives so that the players could choose who to side with, or figure out a way to play both ends against the middle, or make friends with all the factions and bring world peace.
Volkor the Catastrophic Pyroclastic came to be from me wanting to have a new deity that offered powers and a ticking clock at the end of the adventure. My personal favorite class is cleric and I like how Dungeon Crawl Classics presents info about their great pantheon of rich deities and I wanted to try my hand at something like that while staying compatible with Shadowdark, who as far as I know doesn’t have any deity power tables like DCC . I was originally concerned that his powers were too strong, but this is an OSR style adventure and he’s a freaking god, he’s allowed to be overpowered! It’s also the reason I put a soft limit on “invoke powers”, by allowing only one invocation per character, until they have made some effort towards freeing Volkor . Plus, a GM is well within their right to avoid the spells all together if they feel they’re too much, but Volkor will not be pleased. Not one bit.
In my play tests however the lesson I learned is most players don’t mess with weird gods they hear whispering to them in strange underground places. Wusses.
When it comes to designing encounters I am a devout student of Kelsey Dionne and her work, especially these three articles she wrote about encounter design.
For every encounter I design I fill out all the details of what this encounter could be, aiming for a nice even blend of the Three Pillars of D&D. In a classic game of D&D the Three Pillars are; Combat, Exploration (including Traps and Puzzles), and Role-play. I think about what I want the adventure to be about or have happen in it and try to make sure the Three Pillars goal is achieved. Hopefully each encounter can have more than one pillar, but doing one really well is the goal. From there I figure out which Class Archetype this encounter will be designed for; Cleric, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard. Trying to make something that at least one class could really shine at in each encounter. Be it a trap to disarm or a monster to defeat.
My encounter design is heavily influenced by the story that I’m trying to tell, quickly becoming a back and forth between story ideas and game design functionality at the table. The first picture below is the crude map of lines and circles, representing encounters, as I figure out how this map could look. If you look at the rest of the pictures you can see the crude map get more detailed as encounter/story beats get more refined and set in their place. Once I decided I wanted to share IDKC the main goals were to make a small fun adventure with some depth, player agency, open-endedness so that the game could go a multitude of ways depending on player choice, and fit easily into a GM’s world.
When it came to drafting I had about 5 versions to get from a loose free form brainstorm to a finished book. I have a new found respect for anyone whose ever made anything at a “professional” level. That’s what I was going for and I think I got there, but holy cow is that an endless amount of work just refining and tweaking over and over again making sure it works and is as good as I could get it. The evolution of the map tells a story of it’s own, part of which is me getting ahead of myself, because making maps is awesome but a detailed map might eventually have to change if the writing isn’t done. Which in my experience, it’s never done.
Map Commentary
Circle and line maps are your friend! Getting the gist of what the hell this dungeon is supposed to look like while working out whats going to be going on in each room is the name of the game. It allows you to make sure you’ve got your multiple entrances covered and that nice roundabout where you have different ways to go through the dungeon. It’s also a great way to make sure you have a nice blend of encounters that cover the Three Pillars of D&D and that each encounter is at least specialized for one class archetype to shine in.
The second map is free form illustration on a giant piece of dotted notepad. This is my favorite part of the creative process, just messing around with ideas and trying to see what makes sense. Little ideas connect to other ideas and eventually I had a Frankenstein’s monster-esque adventure that was a collection of ideas that needed to be cleaned up so they could fit together nicely into a cohesive experience. Trying to figure out the rough estimates of your map is much easier on blank paper than it is graph paper, it really lets you freely explore the space.
The third map is cleaner for counting squares and trying to figure out how everything fits together on a single sheet of graph paper. Cutting out the rooms like puzzle pieces really helps me play around with the layout. The writing and story should be getting more solidified here, but I’ve found my early drafts are verbose and need edited down and ironed out. My wondferful wife helped me edit by reading and giving me notes, which were hugely helpful in making sure that everything made sense. She’s the best!
At this stage its making sure that PCs have choices to make in which direction they’re going. Going one direction over the other can alter how the game is experienced. For example in one of my play tests Group A had met the Raptarrians and befriended them, the party agreeing to return the Gems of Dormancy if they found any, so when they got to the Praying Arachntis and noticed the Gem beneath the web, the party turned right around and recruited the Raptarrian Warriors who helped force the Praying Arachntis to flee up through the ceiling. Group B, in a different play test, came across the Praying Arachntis lair first and lost a member of the party to the Praying Arachntis Swarm after opening a cocoon. RIP!
The fifth image is the final version before adapting everything in Affinity Publisher. I wanted to use a publishing program to help me design my book and get it to look as professional as I possibly could. Working on a smaller project like IDKC was a great opportunity to learning a new program, It wasn’t too steep of a learning curve, and Affinity is awesome! Once everything was laid out in the document there were gaps where art would be needed to fill. I did the interior art myself, but I wanted the cover to be really awesome, so I hired an awesome artist friend of mine and I think she crushed it!
The sixth and final image is what appears in the book! I’m really happy with how it turned out, but can’t help looking at it and wondering if it could be better somehow haha. I struggled a lot with if I wanted the monster names to appear on the map, pondering if the purple rectangles crowded things up too much. But I think having them makes for a more useful “Quick Reference” at the table. Let me know of your thoughts and what you like to see inside an adventure’s “Quick Reference” section!
Its been a journey to get here from the original concept back in August 2024 but I’m very happy and proud of the final product! The images above are all 5 major drafts in their different evolutions before being done. It’s great to finally be at this stage where I feel like I have something worth sharing. I hope you have as much fun at your table running it as I did at mine!
If you have any feedback on the adventure, positive or negative, please reach out to me through the “Contact Me” form on my home page! My dream is to eventually launch a Kickstarter for IDKC in a small box set with possibly a fold out map, monster pawns, or dare I dream actual minis! But like I said, this is all a dream and the most important part of that dream is that this adventure is solid, fun, and useful for GMs at the table. So, please reach out if you find any glaring issues that I need to iron out after staring at this for to many months and not being to distinguish good from bad any longer.
If you’d like to see me draft my next adventure Escape from the Halls of Annihilation be on the lookout for more emails with frequent updates on behind the screen looks as I design from the ground up! Below is a teaser image of me trying to figure out the overall shape of the dungeon with its different levels and what I think would be fun to see. I’m still keeping track of which of the Three Pillars and Class Archetypes I’m using in which encounter so that there is a lot of variety. Everything you read below is of course subject to change and purely just brainstorming the next project!
I hope you enjoyed this look behind the screen on Into the Depths of Kreüger Castle! Like I said in the beginning, I’ve never written a blog like this before but we made it through! Be sure to keep an eye out for my next email going deeper on Escape from the Halls of Annihilation! As you can probably tell by now that my creative process is a long one and if you’d like to give addition support please checkout my Patreon! Also, yes that is an airship heavily inspired by the Iron Vulture from Tail Spin. I just thought you should know.
Cam
