Skip to main content

Dryad's Sanctuary Release Party

Being trapped in a magical forest that wants to eat or enslave you until you love it has never been so fun!


I am pleased to announce that I'm finally releasing this little adventure out into the wild on Drivethrurpg and Itch.io. I'm not DONE-done with it, and will still probably make edits and updates and additions in the future, but it's finally at a point where I want to share it with everyone else. 

The adventure started out as something I was calling a decadungeon: a twelve-sided 3d map, so that the actual forest itself was a non-euclidean space that connected various locations together in a non-linear fashion. You can get the rough drafts of the maps here. Over the course of writing, and after a few playtests, I realized as novel as it looked and sounded, it didn't really help make the adventure more fun to play, and in the end that's really all that matters to me. I'll definitely use that for a future adventure though, so don't fret.

A Decadungeon 

The Dryad's Sanctuary was also originally created with the game Knave in mind (here are some of my thoughts on it, as well as my own homebrews I've written here and here). That being said, I also designed it with a built in ambiguity so that it can be adapted to your preferred ruleset or plugged into any homebrew campaign. Pretty much any Dungeons & Dragons or OSR derivative handles it with ease. 

I wanted to create something that could be run multiple times, with the same group with quite varying results thanks to the random nature of effects that can happen at any given time during exploration.  And instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I wanted to give my own fresh take on a lot of classic tropes surrounding magic forests, elves, dryads, and other fantastical woodland beings. There's also a number of interactions and motivations from some of the more colorful NPCs that promote revisiting or re-exploring some locations for a second or third time, whether you mean to or not. A straightforward A to B to C dungeoncrawl this is not. 

Try it out, let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more!

or
You pay what you want for it here on Itch.io. 

Comments

  1. Jeremy "frothsof" SmithJune 11, 2019 at 2:17 AM

    LOVE that map! I linked folks over here last week. Keep up the great work!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Than a Bucket of Bolts

Next up on my journey through solo rpg space is a little zine called Bucket of Bolts ( buy it here ), where you take on the POV of medium sized spacecraft, and explore its journey through time and space, cataloging adventures, upgrades, and a timeline of several Captains that have the privilege of being at the helm. It's based on another rpg called Artefact (in which you write from the POV of a sentient magic item or weapon). I had enjoyed  Artefact before, so I was excited to try this one out.  Source:  abduzeedo The game starts with you describing your ship; writing about some basic details like the type of ship, the model and make, the crew who designed and built it, as well as some defining traits like if it's sleek , or powerful , or intimidating .  My particular ship for this game was nicknamed Ladybug, and was the mid-range value model of Hyperion Industries called the Prospect-QX . Sporting the same engine and basic design as their flagship luxury spaceship line, the Pr
Post a Comment
Read more

Lichdom - A Reflective Ascent to Power

 I recently sat down and resolved to start tackling the mountain of rulebooks and rpgs that seemed to be growing by the week before me. That, paired with a sort of terse relationship with video games at the moment, lead me to tackle some of the solo roleplaying games that I had begun to subconsciously collect. I had played one or two before, most notably the famous and award-winning Thousand Year Old Vampire , which was a surreal experience at the least (and a profoundly introspective jaunt at its best).  Source: Dungeon Crawl Classics (seriously great game, check it out too) This week I decided to try one of the newer ones I had picked up: Lichdom (buy it here) . Thanking the past version of me that had the foresight (or the money burning a hole in my digital wallet) for backing the Kickstarter that came with the hardcover and a custom deck of themed playing cards, I cracked open the cards, uncapped a new pen, and creased the spine of a brand new journal to start playing.  Lichdom is
2 comments
Read more

The Mighty - A Whitehack Class

The Mighty Level XP HD AV* ST Slots Groups Raises 1 0 1+2 11 5 1 2 - 2 2,000 2 11 6 1 2 1 3 4,000 3 12 7 1 2 1 4 8,000 4 13 8 2 3 2 5 16,000 5 13 9 2 3 2 6 32,000 6 14 10 2 3 3 7 64,000 7 15 11 3 4 3 8 128,000 8 15 12 3 4 4 9 256,000 9 16 13 3 4 4 10   512,000 10 17 14 4 5 5  Might characters rely on their melee combat skills and heroic strength. They can for example be warriors, guards, brigands, knights, bounty hunters, or barbarians. Whenever their attack puts an enemy at zero or negative hit points, they may use the momentum of that action to attack another, adjacent enemy. This requires a separate roll.     Mighty characters may use the same combat options as everyone else, but they also have slots for unique and powerful combat techniques or fighting styles called Deeds which give t
2 comments
Read more