1-2: Astral Vault

Even though our players won't be able to get to it until exploring more of the dungeon, lets go ahead and design the room beyond our mysterious puzzle-door next.

This is going to be a dead-end with some treasure and a trap, a vault. Opening the puzzle-door should feel like an accomplishment, so in addition to treasure, we'll give the room some gravitas, make it seem important to the astromancer. Let's make all the surfaces match the door, smooth obsidian with stars embedded within them. This will make the room appear to be an infinite space floating in the night sky, should spook/awe the players a bit.

But on to the important bit, treasure! No need to beat around the bush, they've already worked hard to get. in here, so let's put the treasure in the center of the room, and give any thieves the opportunity to lock-pick it pretty easily, but also include a magical trap summoning a star-beast that can be circumvented if they've already dealt with the astromancer. As for treasure, let's add in that lantern from the statue and a few scrolls relevant to the astromancer's style of wizardry.

We're getting into some actual game mechanics now (lockpicking, monsters, spell scrolls, and a magic item), so we've got to consider what game system we're using as the base for this dungeon. I work in the OSR sphere, where thankfully its easy for folks to convert from one system to another on their own, but some things like spells are a little more system-specific. My regular gaming group has gone all-in on Dungeon Crawl Classics this last year, and they're the folks I'm most likely to play-test this dungeon with, so I'll go DCC for now. Maybe I'll get ambitious and do some light conversion for Shadowdark at some point, but that might be best left to the other GMs out there.

I'll include the magic item, THE STAR LANTERN, in today's post, and save the monster for tomorrow's. We don't want a particularly powerful artifact in the party's hands quite yet, but they'll have had to work pretty hard to get this one, so definitely something with consistent utility and unlimited use. The light providing a passive bonus would feel thematically appropriate, and since we're working within the structure of DCC, I think a bonus to Luck would be fun, helpful, but not particularly powerful. And in the true spirit of DCC being a bit fickle, the luck bonus will go away for the day if they get really unlucky by rolling a fumble.