The Halls Of The Damned: How I Did It

The Halls Of The Damned is my brand-new dungeon for the SWADE OSR supplement Gold&Glory by Giuseppe Rotondo. It has been published on DriveThruRPG a few days ago, and I received some messages from friends and G&G fans asking me how I got to design the dungeon and whence I drew inspiration for its gothic-fantasy features.

Let's start from the beginning.

Some months ago I bought Gold&Glory: Seven Deadly Dungeon. I was immediately struck by its simplicity and consistency, and by the way it smoothly integrated with SWADE's rules and game dynamics. So I wrote on my blog an enthusiastic review of the product which drew Giuseppe and SpaceOrange42's attention. Giuseppe thought I captured G&G's spirit and asked me if I was interested in writing a dungeon template for a row of new entries that were about to be published.

Needless to say, I eagerly accepted!

For some days, I thoroughly studied the manual's seven dungeon templates, trying to capture the scripting logic and asking Giuseppe for some advice. Then I started writing.

The gothic-dark fantasy is, by far, my favourite nuance of the genre; so I decided my dungeon would have told a grim horror story with tropes from the classic gothic literature (the haunted castle, the family curse...), some inspirations from old horror fantasy videogames like Castlevania and Diablo, and a splash of cthulhoid nightmares. For instance, I drew inspiration for Casterly's traditional rhyme about the Halls from a famous quest of Diablo's first instalment (The Halls Of The Blind) and, subsequently, for the dungeon's title too!

More than anything else, I was intrigued by the possibility to squeeze a story, along with some secrets and lore, within the template's procedural format. I did it by introducing these elements in the Rumors and Books&Chronicles sections of the book, along with a couple "subquests" within the encounters. My goal was not to develop a full story of the disgraced Ravenwood family but to leave faint hints and give the players the illusion of an underlying background, leaving the rest of the work to the competent hands of the GM, or to the players' imagination in a GMless run of the Halls. As it turned out, and as Giuseppe himself remarked, the result is a story which works well also in a Victorian setting, like Rippers Resurrected.

And that's all, folks! I do really hope you'll enjoy playing several runs within The Halls Of The Damned searching for the Ring of Yore and the truth about the doom that befell the Ravenwoods! And please, also enjoy Matteo Ceresa's wonderful and dashing graphic layout. In my humble opinion his art gives the G&G series a distinctive hue few other fantasy products have.