A Roomscape in an Inn

Here is a roomscape for you:

This used to be a wide, well appointed kitchen before it got looted. A smell of burning stew drifts from the fireplace (and into the adjoining rooms).
Referee info: the kitchen was recently visited by goblins who took most of the food and booby trapped the cauldron in the fireplace.

  • LARGE TABLE with messy ingredients and crockery. A lot of broken plates and bowls on the floor.
  • FOUR CHAIRS toppled or used to reach the SHELVES.
  • A BUCKET IN THE CORNER with forgotten, cold laundry, and a bar of black soap near it.
  • SHELVES. Only the items on the highest shelves are still there (flour, candles, salt). A couple of good butcher knives.
  • FIREPLACE [trapped]. A cauldron sits on a dying fire.
  • [trap] A tripwire causes the cauldron to fall over, spilling and/or breaking six flasks of heated oil that immediately catches fire (damage as oil, spills over a 10ft x 10ft area). The clever goblin who set the trap also threw lard and a freshly dead, unplucked chicken in the cauldron to lure hungry adventurers in.
terrible doodle by me

But what is a Roomscape?

Roomscapes are dungeon room descriptions. They’re the creation of Foot of the Mountain, a mapmaker and blogger I’ve met on Twitter. He posts maps and asks people to describe a room of their choice. In a couple of hours, we all get at crowdsourced dungeon for our games. Here is the archive of all the roomscape threads so far. You can play too if you follow Foot of the Mountain Adventures on Twitter! He also has a Patreon where you can support his work.

My roomscape is actually a translation of room number 5 in my French-language adventure La nuit des rêves perdus (Night of Lost Dreams), which I published on my itch.io page a week or two ago, using one of Foot of the Mountain’s maps. It’s written for Old-School Essentials (so fully compatible with B/X D&D) and I’m hoping to carve out the time to publish it in English too.

I wrote this adventure for newcomers to the old school adventure game style, and I’ve tried to organise the information in order to help the referee easily find the information they’re looking for. After a sentence of general description, the referee gets background information (in italics). The rest is in bullet points: immediately apparent details are in all caps, and lootables are in bold.

You tell me if it would work for you. (And then I can make the adventure better when I translate it.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *