GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: 2-Page Dungeons

This very tightly designed work has, unsurprisingly, 5 dungeons:

• From a Sinking Ship: Get the magic medallion from a terrified rat before the ship sinks into the sea, or the skeletons get it.
• The Blasphemed Shrine: Fight some demons, I guess.
• A Cold Day In: Fight a dragon in a fragile ice cavern
• All Along the Watchtower: Kill the orcs and seize the tower before they can raise alarm
• The Floor is Lava: THE FLOOR IS LAVA!

Each dungeon comes with a detailed map.

I think this is actually a neat concept, and if you run DF, my guess is you'll almost certainly get some use out of them.  The actual execution of several of these dungeons is off, though, and I'll get into ways they could be improved. Is this a buy? Well, for the price, sure!

From a Sinking Ship

This is a very promising concept.  The idea is that you're trying to get at a medallion that is tangled around a rat, on a ship that's slowly sinking, while skeletons are also trying to get it. The ship was a cargo ship, and you can also loot the ship for cargo.

This is a great concept, as it pulls the PCs in several directions and intrinsically creates interesting choices.  You need to fight the skeletons and loot the ship and get the medallion and get off in time.  You can't do all of the above, so you have to prioritize, which means players are doing lots of things, and a disorganized group is doomed, while an organized group can walk away with a haul!

Or they could except the "loot" is hard to find and doesn't amount to much ($45 for 30 lbs). I think the one thing I would have done is make the loot more valuable (gimme some chests of gold and jewels), otherwise the PCs will just ignore it, get the rat as soon as possible and skedaddle, and the time limit becomes less interesting.

 

The Blasphemed Shrine

The players go into a temple, fight some demons, then go into another section with nothing in it except three cruddy fountains ("Are there monsters in the fountains?" "No! Maybe." "I stab the fountains." "You kill the monsters") then they go to the third section where they fight the same demons, plus a boss monster that has to be killed in a specific way, and then maybe loot some sarcophagi that maybe they should leave alone.

This one is boring.  There's no real gimmick other than "Boss is hard to kill!" which is to to be expected.  It's got a Diablo aesthetic, which is nice, I guess.

 

A Cold Day In

The players fight their way through a linear, cold-themed dungeon where fire magic and explosions risk bringing the a collapse of icicles. It's a nice concept, though it requires a little homework on the GM's part. I probably would have added rules for "repairing" damage with ice magic, but it's a pretty tight word count.

All Along the Watchtower

This is a nice concept, in that the players need to avoid giving alarm, so they have to sneak through and make sure all the orcs die without alerting anyone else, and if they do, they'll have to find some way to stop that alarm from getting out!  This makes for a very unusual, more action-like dungeon crawl.  It's a nice change, and probably my favorite of the 2-page dungeons.

Why must they avoid giving alarm? Is it because they'll be swarmed? No. It's because they'll warn the next post.  Of whatever the players are doing. Why does this matter? Well, I think that's the biggest weakness of this particular adventure.  See, the point of a 2-page dungeon is that you can just grab it and toss it into a game. Bored on a Saturday night? Hit up the local FLGS with some characters and a 2-page dungeon and just play this tightly bound, one-off adventure.

But not All Along the Watchtower.  For it to work, there must be a broader context. They talk about this broader context in a blurb, but it has to be there.  That's not a deal breaker, but it does weaken it as a drag-and-drop adventure.

 

The Floor is Lava

THE FLOOR IS LAVA! The adventurers fight their way through a fire-themed dungeon to get a magic crystal, but they have to be careful, because THE FLOOR. IS. LAVA!

Mostly, they face fire-themed enemies, and they're surrounded by lava, and will have to make little hops to get from one outcropping to another, and stray damage might trigger a rock mite spawn.  For a game where THE FLOOR BEING LAVA is so central, it doesn't seem to matter much. The players won't need to do much to avoid the lava, and most of the monsters either can't fall (they fly) or aren't particularly vulnerable to flame.

Anyone who has played Floor is Lava, or seen the gameshow on Netflix, knows that the whole point of the game is deft acrobatics.  I'd like this one a lot more if it were less linear, allowing the rogue or martial artist to flex their dungeon parkour skills and scramble across a shorter, but more dangerous route.  The dungeon is designed from the perspective of slow-moving scrubs making their way carefully across safe rocky outcroppings, but give us some more dangerous, more skill-based outcroppings too. That would give the players more choice, and thus more tension in the scenario (especially if they screw up and a flying enemy start to harass them).

Conclusion

I think this is a fun concept.  It's like twitter poetry: how much dungeon can you fit into two pages? I encourage you to try yourself! It's also a good meditation on dungeon gimmicks and essential dungeon design.

Is it useful? Well, in principle, these are very "one shot" and there's a lot of them, so you can just grab one and run it, which a lot of people will do.  Are they good dungeons? I can't really speak to their design or balance as I don't play enough DF to tell, and I've noted some of the problems with several of them, so if I had to guess I'd say "They're alright." I think in most cases, players will shrug at the memory of the adventure. "It was fine," they'll say.  But the GM will appreciate being able to run a "fine" game at a moment's notice. They're not the memorable ones: there are no Tomb of Evils in here, but they're more cohesive than some randomly generated  dungeon, and fine for a quick, impromptu session or for stalling for time while the GM works on a more interesting or impressive dungeon.  And there are some neat ideas in here that a GM can steal.

It could have been better, and, hot take, I wouldn't mind seeing more of these.  Recommend.