Adventure’s
Cover
Long before the rise
of the first civilization, long before the birth of the elves, travelers from a
distant world traveled to the land. The
travelers possessed technology that appears as magic and were able to
transverse thousands of light years in a blink of an eye, by ‘folding’ the
fabric of space and time. The travelers
made a miscalculation when plotting their coordinates; instead of arriving a
thousand feet above the surface, the travelers arrived a hundred feet below the
ground, in a network of caverns beneath a mountain. The travelers’ ship was damage and unable to
move through space and time. Thus, the
travelers set up beacons throughout the caverns and entered a great slumber,
waiting for a rescue party to arrive… no rescue party came… nearly a million
years passed.
For over a millennium,
the Grumpy Dwarves have lived in the Giant’s Head Mountain. For as long as the dwarves could remember, it
was forbidden to dig below the Giant’s Head.
“There is great evil below the Giant’s Head”, the old saying would
go. “If you dig below the Giant’s Head,
you will release evil upon the clan.”
When the King of the
Grumpy Dwarves passed away, his only old son, Edgarr, inherited the rulership
of the clan. Edgarr was a young fool of
a dwarf, suffering from a ‘short beard complex’. Edgarr desperately wanted to prove that he
was the greatest king of all. One day,
after eating exotic mushrooms, a vision came to Edgarr. The vision told Edgarr that he will find
great treasure underneath the Giant’s Head Mountain.
Despite warnings from
his advisors, Edgarr ordered his dwarves to tunnel below the Giant’s Head. There, the dwarves uncovered a network of
caverns; in the caverns grew strange flora, unlike anything the dwarves had
seen before. The dwarves delved deeper
into the caverns and discovered a strange structure, covered with an exotic
metal alloy. The metal was light weight
and flexible, yet stronger than the strongest steel. King Edgarr was pleased with the find and
commissioned his smiths to forge a crown from the metal.
Shortly after
receiving the crown, King Edgarr fell ill; the smiths, who forged the crown,
fell ill as well. The group of dwarves
sent to explore the caverns never returned.
An expedition of fighting-dwarves was sent to find the missing
group. Only half of the expedition
returned alive and gave accounts of metallic beings and strange monsters
lurking in the caverns. The dwarves
sealed the caverns off and buried the recovered metal deep within the
earth. The King’s Advisors put a call
out for adventurers and offered a reward of a thousand gold pieces to find and
destroy the source of evil that lurks in the caverns beneath the Giant’s Head.
I
have finished writing ‘Beneath the Giant’s Head’, a third-party compatible Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventure designed for a party of Level 2 adventurers. This adventure builds on the events and
setting developed in Fantastic Adventures and the Disgruntled Gong Farmer, a
previous DCC adventure module I designed.
‘Beneath the Giant’s Head’ is available as a free PDF on DriveThruRPG; physical
copies of this adventure will be available in the near future.
Cover
Art
The
below images are of the maps that appear in part 2 of this adventure (the maps
in part 1 were featured in the previous post).
Traveller’s Inn
Caverns (Level 1)
Caverns (Level 2)
Spacecraft
Layout
of the Adventure’s Cover
Beneath
the Giant’s Head. A Level 2 adventure
designed for a party of 6 to 10 characters that builds on the setting
established in Fantastic Adventures and the Disgruntled Gong Farmer, a DCC
adventure module I previously wrote. My
goal of designing ‘Beneath the Giant’s Head’ is to capture the ‘gonzo’ vibe of the
1970s role-playing games, by blending classic fantasy with elements of science
fiction to create a fun and memorable old school gaming experience.
Tasaka Games is my humble one-person tabletop role-playing game company.
