One Page Dungeon Contest Entries

I wanted to collect our One Page Dungeon Contest Entries in one spot with some author commentary! If you are not familiar, the One Page Dungeon Contest (https://www.dungeoncontest.com/) has been running since 2009 and there are hundreds of entries. All are free to download, along with convenient compendiums for purchase. If you ever need a one shot, a drop in dungeon, or even a whole adventure on one page this is a great place to look.

If you check any of these out, I would really love to see your comments! Better yet, if you ever actually run one of them, let me know how it went!

Our Entries:

• 2017 - Escape The Kraken! - Our first ever D&D thing that we actually wrote down and it received an honorable mention in the contest! PC's begin as captives chained to rowing benches on a pirate ship caught in a storm sent by the pirates wrathful god. Can you survive long enough to escape? Grant wrote up this idea and ran it for our group, we immediately decided to clean it up and have both ran it several times for others. I am really proud of this one and we would like to expand it into a small zine. It would probably make an excellent funnel for DCC. I tried to give it a pulp magazine feel in the art and writing.

• 2020 - Orokoa, The Isle of Blood! - A top ten winner for 2020, we were blown away! A semi-sequel to The Kraken based on Grants campaign that followed his pirate ship adventure. We had an idea of making a loose trilogy of one pagers that could be strung into a single pirate/pulp/nautical campaign. Once again I would like to expand this one. Personally my (still not great) art skills are much better and I would like to draw a new map and flesh out all the factions. More fodder for a zine perhaps. Not a dungeon, but I think it offers enough of a frame work to run some shipwreck adventures, and the random elements are fun.

• 2020 - The Cursed Brewery of Brickbeard the Brilliant - A second winner for 2020! I kinda cheated in the contest and entered twice (sans Grant for this entry; the rules say each team AND individual can enter once each). I had an idea about a haunted brewery around 48 hours before the contest ended and wrote this up. Pretty straight forward dungeon for a beer and pretzels game night perhaps.

• 2021 - CALABRIA IMPERILED! - The final part of our trilogy would have seen the adventurers return from the vaguely south seas area of Orokoa to help defend their besieged homeland. I like the idea behind this one but it is just too big for one page. Maybe due for an update as well. I am proud of the map for this as I did a lot more of it by hand before scanning it and adding the digital aspects. I think it would look great as a water colour. Note on real world geography: I used the Venice lagoon (Flipped 180 degrees) as the basis and didn't realize that Calabria is a real place in Italy, so perhaps a name change is in order?

• 2022 - Crawling Ruins of the Lost Heretics - What if the treasure was people locked in stasis, and what if those people were ancient beyond all understanding? I think that was the seed idea for this one. Also, I was playing Metroid Dread at the time; the obvious inspiration for a map with colour coded rooms and doors (not to mention an invincible wandering guardian). Again I think this one has a lot of potential but the idea way too big for a single page. I may revisit it sometime. I especially like the idea that the people locked in stasis could be the players themselves after some time travel shenanigans.

• 2023 - Trapped in the Amethyst Death Mine! - In 2022 the OPDC started adding a dungeon theme component to the contest which I am not a huge fan of, but I did like the 2023 theme "And still, they rise". I had some ideas that just wouldn't work and I abandoned so ended up going with the good old classic horde of zombies that gets reanimated over and over. I also like the idea of putting constant time pressure on the players in the form of a slow moving horde. I didn't spend much time on this one and was rushed at the end so there are some mistakes. I ended up getting some really excellent feedback from one of the judges. I will be using that feedback for 2024!