The Ruins of Azamar

Credit: Alexander Dudar

Hello and welcome to my world building blog!

Today, I will be opening up the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Design Kit by Harold Johnson and Aaron Allston, published in 1988 by TSR, Inc. More specifically, Book III: Adventure Cookbook. The Dungeon Master's Design Kit is broken into three parts or books. Book I is the Adventure Design rulebook and covers more or less how to use the Design Kit, and the sheets and forms included in Book II. Book II is known as the Forms Book because it includes all the forms one can use to organize campaigns.

Book III: Adventure Cookbook, however, is the one I'm interested in because it includes all the elements on creating adventures. The book is set up with tables, and I love using tables. I can input the information into our random generator and hopefully come out with an interesting adventure.

The Adventure Cookbook deals with themes, goals, story hooks, settings, allies... a whole multitude of elements! All of these elements, and much, much more, I'll cover in the next few weeks to create an interesting adventure.

Of course, I haven't forgotten our campaign setting of Azamar. We'll be placing this adventure within the bounds of the setting we developed in previous weeks.

First, the book discusses themes. It lists seven different themes for one to choose from: action, comedy, espionage, and others. Rolling on my random generator, the theme it chose for us is horror. Here is the book's description on the horror theme:

"This type of adventure is designed to scare both the characters and the players. Just having a monster attack is not enough for a horror theme; the monster must first frighten the characters."

I've run horror games before, and the one element you could use to convey horror, or a horror atmosphere is music. The Internet has a plethora of ambient music and sounds you could use while running a horror theme adventure.

I also realized that this is the perfect theme for the religious cult occupying the ancient ruins of Azamar. One of my favorite authors is HP Lovecraft, and any of the Cthulhu mythos creatures is perfect for the cult's deity. Considering this is near the arctic circle, one of the Cthulhu mythos creatures we could use is Ithaqua. Also known as the Death-Walker, according the Lovecraft Wiki, "he has been reported from as far north as the Arctic to the Sub-Artic." Great horror element!

So, with the theme, the book suggests a characteristic: "Dark, musty, old settings, things creeping around in the dark, terrified NPCs, violent weather, inexplicable monsters."

All of these elements we could use in the Ruins of Azamar (believe it or not, this is the perfect, and most natural, name for this adventure: The Ruins of Azamar).

There are also some ground rules the book suggests. "Use psychology to frighten the characters (keep creeping or shambling things at the very edges of their perception, tell them they have the feeling of something watching them, etc.); don't use any monster exactly as written (give it strange abilities and behavior the characters can't predict)."

One of the things I love about running a game is using abnormal or modified creatures. I deal with very experienced players and they know most of the cookie-cutter monsters available with a lot of RPGs. If you modify a monster, "give it strange abilities and behavior the characters can't predict," the players won't know what hit them. An example I can provide; in one of my games, I mixed a unicorn with a nightmare. The creature had the abilities of both creatures, and had the appearance of a black unicorn. The Cthulhu mythos has a multitude of aberrations you can use to scare the crap out of your players.

I don't want to make this entry too long, so I think I'll leave it here. And next week, we'll discuss the goal of the Ruins of Azamar.

I hope you enjoyed the read, and until next time, thanks for reading.