This is the second issue of an ongoing zine series, each focused on short, atmospheric material you can drop into your campaign.
Doomed to Die Issue 2 features The Tower of Dreams, a low-level adventure for Shadowdark RPG.
An illusionist’s crumbling tower disguised by magic, a looping ruin that appears endless to those within. From afar, the tower rises into the clouds. Those who enter find fine halls, soft music, and a host of courteous phantoms. Yet as the climb continues, repetition sets in. The same rooms. The same voices. The same illusions fraying at the seams.
“Americhaos 1994 is a complete hypertext role playing rule book. The game itself is not played on the computer. It is to be used as a hypertext set of rules for playing the game with friends.” read the description of AC94.ZIP, a file for download on a local BBS. The context necessary when it sat next to shareware demos for early Apogee and Epic DOS games. Even amongst now forgotten Adventure inspired text based games that could be mistaken for one another, it stood out., If not itself unique, it’s uniquely ahead of its time and as such has been hiding out in the back of my head since I first saw it years ago.
Pharmacy Run is a third-party adventure module for the obscure tabletop RPG Americhaos 1994, originally distributed as BBS shareware.
Like Americhaos 1994 itself, this module is released as a DOS executable.
Designed as quick introduction to Americhaos 1994, Pharamcy Run is a short scenario of overland travel, gang-ruled towns, and moral compromises in the ruins of the American West. 164 bytes of mayhem.
Requires:
Americhaos 1994 rules
DOSBox (or a real MS-DOS machine)
Both are available as free downloads. Full instructions are in README.txt.
Designed for one‑shots or quick drop‑ins for any classic fantasy system, this adventure takes players into the crumbling fortress of a long‑dead tyrant—where reality fractures, and the White Beast still dreams.
Overview
Those who enter the fortress are drawn into the White Beast’s dream: a surreal dungeon of shifting portals, strange keys, and lurking horrors. Survival means navigating its impossible spaces, evading nightmare creatures, and ultimately confronting the chained Beast—or being lost in its dreams forever.
This is the first issue of an ongoing zine series, each focused on short, atmospheric material you can drop into your campaign.
Doomed to Die Issue 1 features Beneath Stillroot, a low-level adventure for Shadowdark RPG.
At the edge of forgotten cross roads lies the hamlet of Stillroot, a quiet place, all cracked stone and soft-spoken villagers. Travelers find it by accident, welcomed by warm fires and the promise of rest.
There’s a blog post I see referenced a lot, Six Cultures of Play by the Retired Adventurer, that taxonomizes TTRPGs into traditions of play. It’s a useful broad look at the history of D&D and related RPGs and makes some interesting points about differences between Classic (early challenge-driven pre Holmes edition in 1977) and how later OSR retroclone games appear similar but often contrast in terms of challenge (balanced escalation vs. PC driven decision making where balance is not a main focus of challenge). I think it is a well written and thoughtful piece providing some definitions for what previously had kind of been nebulous or lumped together under a general OSR-as-not-Wizards-of-the-Coast-D&D umbrella. As the post states, “most individual gamers and groups are a blend of cultures, with that blend realised as an individual style”—these are large-scale trends, not rigid categories.
It’s the early 2000s. Someone brought their home laptop to work, but there’s only one ethernet port in their office. No problem, they also brought their brand new white plastic Netgear router. Just unplug the desktop, plug it into the router, and… bam, bring down half the network.
Why the Network Died
Computers plugged into the work network get assigned an IP address from the network’s DHCP server. But that little Netgear router? It’s running its own DHCP server. Now when a computer starts up and says:
An Investigative Adventure in the Tradition of Classic Modules for Shadowdark Levels 1-2
In the shadow of Edric von Braech’s ruined keep, Brannam rots. Once filled with life and vibrance, not remains but silence and decay. Its peoples diminished, its streets overgrown, the legacy of its dark history casts long shadows over the dead city. It is said that the people rose up against their oppressor generations ago and put his keep to the torch, Yet generations have passed and the city does not grow. It does not heal. Brannam lies like a corpse in a coffin buried under the weight of its history.
Made a quick Shrine Generator for use with The Lost Tomb of Queen Rhawen, it can generate most of the shrines in the module but is expanded with some more options for the shrine itself and its history and potential controversies it has caused.
Here is a sample:
A knee-high altar made of bronze, depicting a skeletal warrior. It is completely shattered, with only fragments remaining, with a tattered piece of red cloth tied around it left nearby. A local gang claims it protects them from the city guard. The shrine next to it is dedicated to a rival god, and tensions simmer daily.
Dungeons are great, they are a non arbitrary limitation on what players in a TTRPG can do. It’s a confined space that by limiting freedom facilitates meaningful actions. Players in a dungeon are experiencing play at the most immediate scale with the least amount of abstraction. A dungeon is a defined understandable space at a level that a 6 or 12 mile wilderness hex cannot be.
Often what can be is more exciting than knowing the truth and the transition between the known and unknown state is exploration. As players work their way through a dungeon they are narrowing down limitless possibilities to a single understood reality. When you open the door and the area that could contain a manticore becomes the area that either does or does not. But the player’s understanding of the space, partially as a disconnect of trying to visualize a 3d space from descriptions, is not perfect. The manticore could always be invisible.