Sunday 12 July 2020

One Page Dungeon 2020 — Horse Fort

This is my first year submitting something for the One Page Dungeon contest. I love concise dungeons—it leaves lots of flexibility to individual referees, while getting across the kernels of great ideas. There's no extra fluff to read through. Any little details that are missing can be easily made up on the spot during play.

My entry this year is called "Horse Fort" and is inspired by the Halifax Citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I used to live. The Citadel was built on top of a low hilltop overlooking the city, and served as a military fort for the British back when Canada's settler people were just British and French people invading each other's colonial territory over and over. It is now a National Historic Site and serves as a mild tourist attraction.

It is a star-shaped fort like many others. I love the grassy moat surrounding the walls. It isn't really built up from the hilltop, but rather carved out in negative space. There are great stone blocks forming walls, but they shore up natural earth that already existed. The idea of an open-air sunny grassy dungeon really appeals to me. There's no ceiling, but the claustrophobic walls and secluded nature still hit those dungeon notes for me.

I kept things pretty simple with this one. A party intent on solving the mystery of the Horse Fort could probably do so quickly. This isn't meant to be a campaign-driving location—merely an interesting footnote while travelling through an appropriate area. However, the horse god Ceffyl could be connected to more sinister things in your own home campaign. I am a fan of worlds with innumerable small gods, which may not work in your world—Ceffyl could be a demon or a trapped sorcerer instead.




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