D&D General – The Dungeon Dash
I stumbled upon this adventure idea while looking for inspiration for a one-shot session. Essentially, it’s a race between multiple teams to clear as many rooms of a dungeon as fast as possible. The dungeon itself can be in any context that fits, but for this example I borrowed the provided hook, a powerful caster creates an illusory dungeon to provide entertainment to the people of the world.If you wanted to include this in a campaign world then charging an entry fee could prove quite lucrative for the mage and allow him to finance his research with minimal effort once if the mage makes the dungeon sufficiently reusable.
Any layout is fine, though it should be symmetrical for each of the teams participating. I again borrowed from the source of this idea and used the Iron Tomb map as a preset distribution of challenge levels. The harder the room the more ‘flags’ the party gets for success.
Then I set up a balance of ‘trap’ and ‘monster’ rooms and started statting out any of the rooms the players could conceivably reach. The Iron Tomb map only has 25 rooms, and of those only about 14 are likely to be entered by the players. Even if they got to one I didn’t anticipate, I could’ve just swapped the contents as needed.
Essentially, a ‘monster’ room was a straight up fight with a monster. A ‘trap’ room had some sort of twist. Climbing across ropes above a pool of shark infested water, fighting spectres on a tilting platform, and so on.
The whole thing is on an in-game time limit. I used 20 minutes for the rest run, but the Iron Tomb is a small dungeon and the entire area was clear in 7 minutes. 10 minutes would be good. It keeps the players on the move and stops them from just spamming wands of cure light wounds between rooms.
For the other teams I just decided on what order they each visited rooms and assumed they cleared all of them, except for 1 team I decided would get eliminated in the toughest room on the map. Because the dungeon is primarily illusory, they aren’t actually killed, and thus are motivated to try again.
For further context perhaps this wizard signs up with the local adventurers guild as a trainer?
I’ll be running another Dungeon Dash this weekend, and I highly recommend it as either a one-shot event or as some spice for a campaign. Just beware, if you add it to a campaign your players might not want to do any more standard adventures!
Source: http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dungeon_Dash_%28DnD_Variant_Rule%29
