Esoteric Enterprises - Dungeon Entrances

Meant to write this one up a year ago, forgot about it until now.

Dungeon entrances for Esoteric Enterprises. The core rules text gives various entrances. Sewer tunnel, crypt, housing project, nightclub, etc. Besides these locations, there's very little flavor or gameplay given to the surface city. More types of entrance means more flavor for the surface city.

Photo by JJ Harrison

GALLERY

Not a full on Occult Gallery, but a surface structure that could have a painting or two linked to one. It also has a hidden staircase or hatch that leads into the underworld.

They charge a fixed fee per use of the dungeon entrance. Say $50 per person, or $40 per head for a group of four or more people. This is framed as a "suggested donation" but they aren't unlocking the door unless you pay. This one-time fee includes entry and exit, they aren't going to toll you twice. If you enter somewhere else and exit through the gallery they don't charge you.

MAFIA CONTROLLED BUSINESS

A bar, bathhouse, restaurant, or other legitimate front. The backroom or basement has the stairs down to the dungeon, watched over by armed wise guys.

Entry into the undercity is free (for anyone not known to be a police informer or enemy of the family). Anyone exiting to the surface through this entrance is taxed 10% of the value of the loot recovered. Safe from exit campers, at least.

Obviously the guards on the stairs are gun toting Mobsters, with a Lieutenant somewhere on the premises in case they need backup.

MUSEUM

A museum in an old building. It's closed at night, patrolled by security guards. There's a closed wing in the back, under renovation or used for storage. In that room is a staircase going down to the underworld below.

If the stairs go down to a dungeon node populated by a faction, the room is guarded by a couple NPCs or creatures from that faction.

NECROPOLIS

The dungeon entrance is in an old mausoleum. The necropolis is guarded by a militia drawn from the wealthy families whose ancestors are entombed there. They assume anyone entering at night is here to pillage graves. They politely escort trespassers out on the first offense, and shoot on subsequent violations.

The militia are Thugs with rifles, pistols and shotguns, plus a couple leaders who use the Mobster stat block.

If too many gunfights break out in the Necropolis, the police kick the militia out and establish a permanent presence there, making it even harder to enter and exit.

 

NIGHTCLUB
The top level is a normal nightclub. The bottom has underworld creatures and doorways leading into the dungeon. Entry and exit are free, but the tables are occupied by a random faction every time the players visit, which can result in awkwardness or violence.

WAREHOUSE

Or other abandoned building in a violent or abandoned part of town. No faction controls it, but there's always a random encounter when you enter or exit. It's highly likely that intelligent humans camping the exit are waiting for adventurers to emerge so they can rob them.

Esoteric Enterprises - Bathhouse

Developed with Grandini

This dungeon node is an underground bathhouse. It is connected to a surface building, and to the underworld below. It can be part of a Social Underworld faction, or independent.

Google docs version here.

 

Photo from South China Morning Post

GENERATING UNDERGROUND BATHHOUSES

Place a token at the center of the map. That’s the lobby, accessible through a door in the building above (John Wick style nightclub, old Roman structure, historic building, etc).

Roll your dice sized D8 and lower around the lobby. These are your mundane rooms. Roll your larger dice (D10 to D00) further out - those are the underworld baths, where stuff gets weird. You can connect the rooms at the edge of the page to tunnels leading to your other dungeon complexes.

Rooms numbered 1 through 8 are open to the public - though they may sometimes be reserved for private use by a faction. 9 through 00 are members or staff only.

Some rooms in a bathhouse may be sex segregated - in that case, use the color of the dice to determine which. Warm colors for women, cool colors for men. Or the entire bathhouse might be exclusive to one or the other.

In some parts of the world (particularly the United States) a “bathhouse” is a euphemism for a brothel or sex club. Decide if your underground baths fit that description.

CONNECTIONS
Halls in the Baths are 10 feet wide and softly lit. If they connect to a room with water, they have tile floors. Otherwise they’re soft carpet. Doors are made of varnished wood and swing both directions. Those between public and private areas are locked, but doors between rooms 11 to 00 are not locked.

Doors to the underworld beyond are sturdier than the wood doors used in the interior, and are all locked. The ones that lead to dangerous areas might also be guarded. Banging on the doors from outside will usually get an armed response, though the players might be able to talk their way past. Players who make a good impression on the bathhouse owners can get keys to these doors for free passage.

 

Esoteric Enterprises - Botanic Gardens

This dungeon area includes a small custom faction which inhabits it.

Google Docs version here.

GENERATING BOTANIC GARDENS

Throw down a few D6s onto your map page. Draw a line through them from one end of the page to the other. That line is your river. It enters as a waterfall from above, and exits as a waterfall into the unknown depths below.

Roll the rest of your dice (mostly D20s) on the page and connect them as normal, both to the D4s and to each other.

Make sure you drop an “other” die on the board (a coin or something) as well. This will be the Druids’ den.

The color of a die determines how a chamber is lit

• Warm colors (red, yellow, orange) have stone faces in the walls, whose eyes radiate magical sunlight
• Cool colors (blue, purple, green) have patches of lichen on the ceiling, that glow like moonlight
• Neutral colors (brown, black, white) are lit in a wavelength not visible to the human eye. The plants there are an underground species that photosynthesizes just the same

Ceilings in Botanic Gardens are twenty feet high. Hallways between rooms are ten feet wide.

The river is five feet deep and has six inches of air above it where it travels between rooms.

Where passages between chambers numbered 7 to 20 cross over the river, they bridge it with logs or wood planks.

Esoteric Enterprises - Occult Gallery

This node is made to house the Occult Artists Collective result from the Social Underworld table. It can be placed on the surface in a building, or underground.

Google docs version here.

Michael Hutter

GENERATING AN OCCULT GALLERY

Use D20s to generate the Gallery. Record the color of the dice as well as the number showing. The color determines the architectural style of the room and the art displayed within it. It also determines the special properties of any guardians spawned in that room.

• Red: Classical/Neoclassical. Giant Guardians with double hit dice and damage dice, but -2 to hit versus human size targets
• Blue: Cubist. Guardians ignore successful attacks that roll an odd-number to hit, except area attacks
• Yellow: Art Deco. Guardians armed with Thompsons and Browning Automatic Rifles, dealing D10 damage and using the Covering Fire rules
• Orange: Surrealist. Guardians deal damage directly to flesh, but make a reaction roll each round to see if they even attack
• Green: Anti Art/Post Modernist. Guardians deconstruct one of the target’s items on a successful hit.
• Purple: Realist. Guardians have the same abilities as the players
• Brown: Medieval/Gothic. Guardians cast Bleeding Curse, Cure Wounds and Darkness at will
• White: High Modernist/Brutalist. Guardians get +4 AC, no Grit but double Flesh
• Black: Futurist. Guardians incredibly fast, always attack first

After you’ve connected the D20s, drop a few coins on the map. Connect each to one or two of the D20s.

The entrances where the Gallery connects to the rest of the Underworld, or the surface, have donation boxes where patrons can drop money or items of value. They also have little pamphlets with cryptic descriptions of the exhibits inside, and vague suggestions about where they can be found.

Unless otherwise stated, passages between rooms are ten feet wide, well lit, with double doors that are unlocked and open.

Esoteric Enterprises - Underworld Vault

I really liked the Vaults from the roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The enemies have cool abilities that disrupt the usual player tactics and force them to prioritize threats in novel ways. I had a scrapped post about adapting some of them to tabletop games, and that became this custom area for Esoteric Enterprises.

The biggest flaw with this adaptation is that it's not very interesting unless the players deliberately break the rules, and then it might be too dangerous to be worthwhile. Too scary for low power characters, not worth the effort for tougher ones.

Google docs version here

GENERATING AN UNDERWORLD VAULT

Separate your dice out, with D4s and D6s in one pile, and everything else in the other pile.

Toss a couple D4s or D6s at the edge of the map for each connection to the rest of the underworld. These are the public facing rooms

Toss the rest of your dice inside the perimeter formed by the public rooms. These are the inner vaults.

CONNECTIONS
Doors between rooms whose value is 6 or lower are ordinary wooden doors, which can be easily opened or battered down.

Doors between rooms 7 and up are reinforced steel. Vault inhabitants can move between them freely, but they’re locked to the players. If it matters, roll a D4 to see what a vault door is secured by.

1. Retinal Scanner
2. Fingerprint Scanner
3. Voice Print Scanner
4. Keypad Lock

With a dungeon turn’s worth of work, vault doors can be hacked with a Technology roll, or forced with Vandalism. The latter sets off an alarm.

VAULT VISITORS
Rooms numbered 1 through 6 are often visited by inhabitants of the occult underworld. Choose a random faction or roll on the Weirdos (page 184), Mundane Explorers (184), Religious Sorts (184), Petty Criminals (185) or Inhabitants of the Undercity (187) table to see who’s doing their banking.

Esoteric Enterprises - Spider Nest

Another custom underworld area for Esoteric Enterprises. Also available as a Google Doc here

Vaguely inspired by the area of the same name from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and a little bit by the Deepnest and a couple other areas from Hollow Knight. 

And of course, the classic children's book Trouble in Bugland by Kotzwinkle and Servello.

Esoteric Enterprises - Abattoir

I developed a few custom dungeon areas for No Town Like Cow Town. I wanted to see if I could take the tools presented by the EE book and iterate on them to make something new. The main thing I wanted to improve is the guidance presented for using a specific mix of dice to achieve a desired result. I also gave page number references for all the monster manual entries to make referencing the book easier.

The abattoir is the first one I created, and also the first one the players visited, so now I can post it. It's based on the original Oddworld game, with a little inspiration from Pathologic.

Also available as a google doc here