One room dungeon
The one room dungeon lives rent free in my mind. After reading Sam Sorensen's tweet a couple days ago, I have developed a primal urge to explore this idea of a single, highly detailed room as the sole purveyor of challenge for a session.
Two ideas came to mind:
The bad mojo approach: players are miniaturized to insect size and traverse a single extremely messy room. This is a bit of a copout, as a single room from such a tiny perspective becomes a dungeon with multiple rooms or a complex hexcrawl. Each individual object in a messy room can become a micro-dungeon, a single furry mat becomes an alien forest, and so on.
Car as dungeon: a cramped space, full of hidden nooks and crannies and dangers. No barrier peaks pretending this isn’t a car type of thing. It is an old abandoned car, teleported to your game world through magic. I’ll go with this one
Here is a first pass at this idea, statted for Troika:
A two door sedan style car, slightly hidden by foliage on the side of the road. Its once vibrant red paint has faded to a soft brownish color, hiding the splotches of rust strewn about its carapace. The driver’s door is locked but the passenger’s is stuck. The windows are made of privacy glass and are currently up. The trunk is locked and a thick black pool of oil accumulates under the vehicle. The car’s battery is still alive and its alarms will go off if the doors are tampered, lasting for 1 round. If fighting breaks out inside the car, airbags will pop out with a loud bang, causing deafness for 1 round.
The car is built from metal and techniques not known to this world. Scraping it for parts amounts to roughly 20.000p and would take a skilled team roughly 6 hours to disassemble. It is heavy and pushing it with deflated tires requires at least four people. Lifting it without proper equipment or superhuman strength takes at least 8 people. Wizards and entrepreneurs in particular are drawn to its arcane construction and potential and are the most probable buyers. The car’s presence in this sphere will irrevocably change it, a technological revolution will occur in the coming decades if it is not destroyed. War will follow in its wake.
Random encounters: 1 in 6 chance for every 10 minutes of play. Roll immediately when loud noises are made.
1-2 A curious black bear. Skill 8, Stamina 14, Initiative 3, Armour 2, Damage as large beast.
3-4 An expedition force of 2d6+1 goblins. Skill 5, Stamina 6, Initiative 1, Armour 1, Damage as weapon.
5-6 1d6 bandits coming back to dismantle the car. Skill 5, Stamina 10, Initiative 2, Armour 1, Damage as weapon.
1.Roof
A black cat sleeps here.
2.Back trunk
Locked. Inside 6 large cardboard boxes containing 68 bottles of expired mouthwash, tutti-frutti flavored, faded out branding. A snake is hiding amongst the boxes, it came up through a hole in the bottom, a low hissing sound can be heard when the trunk is opened. It will attack anyone that tries to move the boxes, test luck or die.
The back seats of the car can be seen and easily folded to gain access to the car. The seatbelt snake will attempt to strangle anyone that does so.
Snake Skill 9, Stamina 4, Initiative 2, Armour 0, Test luck or die.
Seatbelt Snake Skill 9, Stamina 13, Initiative 3, Armour 1, Damage as medium beast.
3.Wheels
4 deflated tires, the rims are stock and made of plastic. Lodged inside the rightmost front tire are 25 modern day coins of varying values. They are not made from valuable metals, but can fetch up to 500p with hip numismatists.
4.Passenger’s seat, front
Old plaid fabric, dark but stained with sweat. There is something hard in the cushion, easily noticed when sitting. Tearing it open reveals a box of instant coffee, worth 150p. A working fire extinguisher is fastened to the underside of the seat with plastic bands.
Opening the glovebox releases a foul odor of decomposition, stemming from the moldy fast food burger inside. The burger is alive and hungry, attempting to gnaw on unsuspecting victims and releasing deadly spores when defeated. Deeper in the glovebox, a pack of maps depicting an unknown world sit atop a loaded semi-automatic firearm. The maps are a novelty worth 50p to collectors and the gun has 12 bullets in the mag, damage as pistolet but is doubled.
Hungry Burger Skill 6, Stamina 8, Initiative 2, Armour 1, Damage as small beast. Upon death, test luck or suffocate on spores, losing half your stamina rounded up.
5.Driver’s seat
The seat is covered in 100 wooden beads, they are loosely tied and sitting will cause them to spill all over the car. The car keys are lodged under the accelerator. A child’s hand can easily reach the keys, otherwise the foot controls will move on their own and attempt to crush the thief’s hand, test luck to avoid.
The car keys can be used to open all doors, and a white chess pawn hangs from the keychain. Once per day the holder of the pawn can use it to physically control a humanoid it can see for 1 minute. Anything you do to the pawn will be reflected on the target.
The car electronics will light up when the key is inserted into the ignition, causing the demon in the radio to fully awake. There is a gas leak and the car cannot start.
6.Radio and electronics dashboard The radio is haunted by an electric demon drawn to the car. They control the car’s mechanics and electronics when awake and for as long as the car’s battery is connected. It will lock the doors and blast out freezing air through the air conditioner, causing anyone inside to freeze to death in 3 rounds. Communication is done through chopped up radio transmissions, blarting out insults and car commercials.
The car’s cigarette lighter is working, perpetually red hot and hissing. Anything lit by it will never go out.
7.Back seats
The back seats are reached by lowering the front seats, the mechanics have rusted over and require a good shove, or by squishing yourself over to the back.
The ground is filled with an untold amount of fast food packaging and beer bottles. Disturbing the sea of trash causes a swarm of roaches to spread out through the car. Under the garbage and lined out in the car’s felt behind the driver’s seat is a secret storage compartment. When popped open it reveals the car’s manual, a veritable tome of over 1000 yellowed pages capable of unlocking the deeper secrets of combustion engines. It would take an experienced wizard 5 years of research to parse the tome, which they would gladly pay 2.000p for the chance to do so. The tome is frail and easily ruined by quick changes in temperature.
Disturbing the seats proper causes the seatbelt snake to attack. They cannot reach over to the front seats and are immune to all but cutting weapons.
Swarming roaches Skill 5, Stamina 5, Initiative 1, Armour 0, Damage as small beast.
Seatbelt Snake Skill 9, Stamina 13, Initiative 3, Armour 1, Damage as medium beast.
8.Underbelly
Thick oil seeps from a wound caused by a switchblade. To reach it would mean to crawl in an unflattering position and cover yourself head to toe in gasoline. Tearing the wound open and searching the cavity reveals a plastic bag with a solid gold maneki neko statuette, worth 300p. Putting it on display in your business will improve its gross yearly revenue by 1%.
9.Engine
The red plastic battery with a comically large lightning bolt drawing that houses the electric demon is visibly vibrating, untold energy yearning to leave it. Attempting to touch the battery without rubber gloves will lead to instant death. The demon inside is harmless if disconnected from the car. The battery can easily power anything indefinitely but it will also cause the object in question to be possessed by the demon. Electrically inclined mad men would be willing to pay 500p for it.
The engine itself is a marvelous piece of engineering never before seen in this world, but it has been rusted beyond repair by neglect. Replicating it is possible, but would take a serious feat of reverse engineering and at least a decade of work.