Adventure Site Contest 2: The Pit of the Muirneag

​Written by Stooshie & Stramash
Labyrinth Lord, levels 5-8
Dragon lair pit.
  The Pit of the Muirneag (‘Beautiful Girl’) is in a rugged gorse-filled and lightly wooded area that sees snow for 7-8 months of the year. The pit was a holy shrine dedicated to the earth goddess Muirneag as it was a bountiful source of gems, and the goddess gave her people the Iron Egg. Last winter a calamity befell them and the holy site was attacked. The reports say that white demons emerged from a blizzard and slaughtered all, taking the riches for themselves. Recently however trappers and hunters have went missing as have some brave traders who use the nearby trail as a shortcut across the hill.
  We are blessed this week. We have not just one, but two, dragon sites. Stooshie, the second-place finisher in last year’s Adventure Site Contest, gives us a mother/son pair of white dragons in the middle of a Dyson Logos pit map. As we know, Stooshie knows how to write an open site with a threatening set of inhabitants, so I won’t be surprising any of you when I say it’s decently written, well-formatted, and manages twenty-three locations in the three pages pretty efficiently. This time, there’s also not a random encounter table that requires sitting down with a calculator and a page of equations, which is nice.
  Our story is actually fairly complex. The pit location is a gem mine that was dedicated to an earth goddess, “The Muirneag”, who granted her followers an “Iron Egg”, explicitly a McGuffin not appearing here. The site was actually dedicated to the evil earth prince Ogremoch, but then taken over by and archmage and his dragon allies, and then abandoned by the archmage and taken over by an efreet who has the white dragons captive. It’s very complicated but I appreciate specificity in the site and in the hooks related to it, we can easily dismiss it if we’re adapting for our own world but a lack of specificity always means needed details fall through.
  As always, a Dyson Logos map is okay. Not the best thing in the world, not as ideal as something bespoke, but a solid enough geometry and the style is clean and very clear. The big pit design gives much-needed nonlinearity to what is otherwise a deceptively linear map, mostly just spokes around the wheel. The secret doors are in fact the natural path, it’s counter-intuitive but a direct rappel down is in fact the best route. I do have an issue with how hard it’ll be to convey to a mapper at the table, because anything directly imported to a VTT or whatever using the pretty Dyson original reveals far too much about the hidden passways.

  Said secret doors are the bulk of the non-combat interactivity for the site, there are a bunch of dead-ends with little statues holding bowls, putting in appropriate pebbles/stones/clay to those bowls open them up. Other doors have informative graffiti, Wizard Locks, etc…every liminal space in the site speaks to the players, which is neat. There’s an interesting not-trap with a crumbled section of the ramp covering a giant’s corpse, observant players might be more suspicious of the main path than is warranted because of it. I like how the earth prince can in fact be summoned in a chamber early on, with ideally some very disastrous results.
  I spoke about dragons at the beginning, but the two white dragons are actually rather pitiful. The young dragon is burned, skinny, and scared, while bigger momma is chained to the walls below. Both are abused by the fire plane creatures who are the main enemies here. Steam, smoke, hot fires are in particular areas, buffing the fire outsiders considerably in those scalding conditions. The big boss is getting summoned in possibly early but he’ll definitely arrive for a good fun nasty bossfight in the final room around the chained-up dragon momma. There’s a chance for negotiation, but it’s pretty spare, mostly with momma white dragon offering bribes to let her go.
  As expected from a gem mine, most cash loot is gem-related, in the nests of the local wildlife, on the dragon’s body, in said giant’s corpse…the dragon’s bling is the source of 90% of the site’s wealth, and there’s not a lot of magic available. Not a lot of hiding stuff here but total reward is worth an afternoon’s interest for APL 6’s.
  Despite the detailed backstory, this site is pretty effortless to put in almost any campaign, at least any campaign that has dragons and evil fire elementals. Change the names to fit any your good to go, lads.