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Wonder and Madness

Back in the summer I mentioned that I had submitted an entry to the One Page Dungeon Contest, which challenges creators to make a table top RPG adventure or dungeon entirely contained to a single page. Of course, I thought 'one page?, pffff... that sounds easy.' Turns out, not so much. On top of that, this year's theme was 'Wonder', so I needed to come up with something that was more than just a map and a list of monsters - I needed something that would make people go wide-eyed, and give them an 'a-ha' moment.

I wracked my brains for a week or so, before finally asking myself the right question; 'what is a design that can ONLY work on a single sheet of paper?' That's when the idea for "The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad!" popped into my head.

Inspired by the work of cartoonist Al Jaffee of Mad Magazine fame, my One Page Dungeon works like a 'fold-in'; you need to fold the paper in different ways in order to access different parts of the dungeon. That made it extradimensional, and inspired the story of a wizard driven mad by his magical study of all things extradimensional, eventually drawing him into conflict with the Infernal God of Madness, Awhout-rout-yuth (pronounced in the way hyenas would howl it).

From there, it was easy (not really). All I had to do was figure out a progression in the story and challenges that would allow the dungeon to be folded and unfolded in a way that would lead players through it. As they figure out how the dungeon works, they confront Jaffee's pets, inspirations, failed experiments, and the three servants of Awhout-rout-yuth - all imprisoned in the dungeon. - before finally facing Jaffee himself - now possessed by the Mad God, who they can defeat in different ways.

Anyway - here is my One Page Dungeon for you to download and play with your group. Note - because you need to be able to fold the page, you will need to print it out to use it (or photoshop up the different configurations). The adventure is game-system agnostic (one of the rules of the contest), though it should be pretty easy to adapt it at run time if you play DnD or Pathfinder, or pretty much any fantasy RPG. I have also uploaded four characters that I used to test the adventure with my different gaming groups. The characters are made using a game system I have been developing for the past 10 years... COMING SOON!). While you won't be able to use these characters without my TTRPG rules, you should be able to roughly understand how they could translate your favourite system if you want to use them. Also, they include a little bit of individual backstory that connects them to the plot and gives more context to the story.

If you like this format, you can PWYW for the Compendium of all the 2022 One Page Dungeon contest entries (there were 84!). Even if you played one a week with your group, they will last you easily until next year's contest, so that's a good deal. I've only had a chance to skim through the book, but there are several in there that look really cool. My own entry made it into the Winners Circle, which, after looking at the competition, I must say I am proud of. You can see the list of the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions here.

Also worth noting, this would not have been possible without Dungeon Scrawl by @ProbableTrain. This is just a fantastic tool for making quick and easy underground dungeon maps to a high level of quality. In general, I don't make dungeon crawl style adventures, but that was what The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! needed to be, and I couldn't have done it without a tool that allowed me to make and test a lot of different iterations quickly... even working on graph paper was tricky as I went through about 40 iterations before I even figured out the basics of how the dungeon needed to fold - so the digital tool really made that more efficient and less wasteful.

Perhaps I'll post more another time about some of the many online tools I've been using to build up my RPG game rules and content.

A final thanks also to my own playtesters... you know who you are. I couldn't have gotten this dungeon together with your skill and passion.

Anyway, hope you enjoy playing, and feel inspired to submit next year!

One Page Dungeon Contest 2022

Years ago, I used to do a lot of tabletop RPG gaming. I played almost every weekend for probably about 15 years from the time I joined my first real D&D group as part of a high school club in 1986 (yes, exactly like in Stranger Things), until I moved to Montreal in 2001 to become a professional videogame developer and was separated from my longtime gaming groups.

Over the years we tried many different games and systems. Starting from the original red box D&D basic set that I learned on, then moving to AD&D, Top Secret, Gamma World, Paranoia, Traveller, GURPS, and a weird but delightful science-fiction game made by a friend called EXP, and certainly some others that I have since forgotten.

This story gets a lot more complex and interesting in ways I'll discuss soon, but to get to the point - when COVID landed, I reached back out to my old gaming group, and we started playing again online. Over the course of the last 2+ years we've played most weekends using Zoom and Miro and other online tools to facilitate play. It's been a blast, and honestly, in some ways the pandemic has probably been a net positive for me thanks to that.

Recently, in looking for adventure materials, I started to come across of a lot of one page dungeons - which I find interesting and convenient. Soon, a search for one page dungeons led me to the One Page Dungeon Contest website, where they have been running an annual contest for the past 13 years! So I decided to enter.

I designed a dungeon, playtested it a couple of times, and submitted it a couple weeks ago. Since the contest is still open, I'm not going to share my dungeon yet - but you can at least read the blurb on the submission page. Mine is titled The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! Also - you still have a few days before the contest closes, and there is no better way to get your hands on a pile of new content for your players than submitting an entry - as I understand it, all entrants will receive a copy of compendium that includes all the submissions - which I am very much looking forward to.

Once the contest is finished, I'll share my dungeon here as well, and I'll probably also include the pre-generated characters I made for my playtesters to use while testing it for me. Perhaps along with a few other surprises...