The Moon Towers of the Mushroom Forest

 

I'm working on my first adventure I want to publish for Old-School Essentials. The focus of it is a mini sandbox region with several towers for the players to explore. I was initially going with the region being a valley with the towers scattered throughout it, but now I'm thinking of setting it in a mushroom forest. I like the potential name of it as well, The Moon Towers of the Mushroom Forest. Imagine exploring through the spore haze of the forest, watching for danger and coming across a clearing where a tower glowing with moonlight. While you can only see these towers at night, they are each solid enough to interact with during a specific phase of the moon. This would make eight towers in all and give the players something to explore every night.

The towers will each have a puzzle, deadly traps, and a variety of creatures within. Original I know, what dungeon isn't like this and sure a multilevel dungeon upwards instead of underground isn't as fresh, but my focus is to make a fun adventure, not reinvent the wheel. I do think having a trap that magically dumps the players onto the moon would be fun. Maybe it's not as deadly as if you were suddenly magically teleported to our moon and could even open up the party to additional adventure. I might even make a moon adventure to go with this as the adventure develops.

The mushroom forest idea came from when I made a hex map for my OSE group and one tile I placed was a mushroom forest. My players were intrigued by this one tile and had planned to go visit it, but were wiped out by a chad gnoll that had nothing but great rolls throughout the encounter. Since then I've been working on the mushroom forest.

I've been reading through several different adventures for OSE people made and In the Shadow of Tower Silver Axe is one of my favorites. I like the book's layout, dungeons fitting on one page with map and details for each room. Each location is on one to two pages. There isn't a ton of lore dumped on every page, that's done at the beginning with just the information the Referee needs. When I make this adventure my goal is to keep the layout as simple so it's easy to use.

Along with the eight towers the players can explore at night there needs to be things the players can do during the day. So I'll be detailing each location in the forest from adventure to natural to settlement and I'll detail each of the towers with maps as I make them.

With the towers being dungeons players will have limited time for which to explore them. In terms of dungeon exploration time they'll have between eight to nine hours before the towers fade away in the sunlight. If the players are in the towers they'll fall to the ground from whatever floor they are on and take falling damage. That's roughly forty-eight to fifty-four turns before the towers vanish for the day. Each phase of the moon lasts for about one to seven days giving players a few days to explore a tower. The New Moon and Full Moon towers will have the fewest days, so I think they should be deadlier and have more rewards for exploring them. I'll be working on unique magical items and spells the players can get from defeating the boss of each tower. 

The region will need a settlement as a homebase for the players to get equipment, retainers, services, and quests to help motivate exploration. I'll make a few factions the players can interact with and a growing problem the threatens the region. That's all I have for now,  but I'll be posting updates as I progress.