Beneath Beatrice Blackwell's Basement

Rumors of long-lost smuggling tunnels promise untold riches to the crime family who can locate an entrance. The rising Murdoch clan is convinced that one of these access points is hidden under the old Blackwell family crypts.

But the ruthless Blackwell matriarchs knew how to protect the secret of their smuggling empire with tricks, traps, guardians, and worse.

The crime family sent their best delvers down into Beatrice Blackwell's basement, but none returned. Now the Murdochs look for outside support.

-

Beneath Beatrice Blackwell's Basement is a layered scenario about a smuggling mafia trying to gain a local foothold, an old family crypt with a secret, and a kobold tribe with big ambitions. It's trap-heavy module intended for a party of levels 2-3. The traps are all very fun and cool, not overbuilt 'gotchas,' and there's even a build-your-own-trap-on-the-fly section with advice for the referee. There's a classic gelatinous cube setup, a kobold knight riding a fire beetle, and a very fun corpse scavenger hunt subplot that involves searching for the previous victims of the dungeon, the hapless first party sent down there to die. The PCs get paid per body recovered and some of them require a little detective work to locate and remove. Most groups take around two sessions to complete the delve.

Yochai Gal gave this one a special shoutout on his podcast Between Two Cairns, showing that he is a man of culture and taste. A lot of folks sleep on this one. I blame myself because I named it "some lady's basement." What was I thinking?

-

"I'm a huge fan of these, these are awesome. They read so easily
and they're so funny and like, I just really love them...
I think they're wonderful and people should check 'em out."
- Yochai Gal (Cairn), Between Two Cairns podcast

"I feel like these books need a series name, y'know?
I need some kind of identity to assign to these things."
-Brad Kerr (Hideous Daylight, etc), Between Two Cairns Podcast
(my guy, I'm open to suggestions!)

-

This adventure is part of a series of lovingly handcrafted zine-style OSR modules with intricate hand-drawn maps, intended to showcase unique and consequential locations for low-level parties to experience in the oldschool, exploratory style. All the art is hand-drawn by real people and always will be. My goal is to show off low-level adventures with some real depth and interaction, more than simple dungeoncrawls. They are generally compatible with Basic Fantasy, Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, DCC, Five Torches Deep, and most other OSR-style rulesets. You can easily convert them into modern systems if that's your thing. Every adventure is thoroughly playtested with multiple groups at my own table so you can be sure that you're not getting some dashed-off nonsense here, these are gonna give you a good time. You can preview the entire thing before buying.

Don't let the small page count mislead you, this module is formatted to be as compact as possible for use during a game session. It's designed to be printed on four sides of Ltr/A4 paper and folded in half, zine-style, easy to reference. The dungeon map is the center spread; you flip upward to see the threats and downward to see room descriptions. Screen and print versions are both included with purchase but seriously print it out, it's all black&white and intentionally cheap cheap cheap to print.