I’m happy to announce that my over-the-top, trap-laden killer-dungeon, The Barbican of Blood, was made a finalist in the second annual Adventure Site Competition by Coldlight Press. The collected eight finalists and winning dungeon have now been released as a PWYW document on drivethru RPG. You can click the image below to download it and bask in its dungeon crawling goodness.

Thanks to all the judges for their comments and feedback. My dungeon seemed to be divisive in the scoring, and that makes sense. It is baroque, linear, and wants player characters to die. It falls into the great tradition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons killer modules; assholish, PC-slaying dungeons from back in the day. The kind spearheaded by the likes of Gary Gygax, then perfected by Rob Kuntz. It is also inspired by the ‘world first’ early modules of the Judges Guild – like Citadel of Fire – where an adventure location exists in a milieu; uncaring, brutal, and inflicting woe unto all who discover it.

I sat down to write the Barbican of Blood over two four hour sessions during the Christmas break 2024. I had recently re-read the three little brown books of the original game, and was wistfully day dreaming about the system’s untethered possibilities. Those who have read my ASC II entry and are familiar with the original edition will notice that the upper works use the castle encounters in 0e as their basis, where a Lord will ride out and challenge fighting-men to a joust. I settled on mixing this with a vampire lair as I’m a big Gothic fiction fanboy. I also wanted to use a monster with good reason to guard its lair with ridiculous traps. Vampires, being incredibly protective of their coffin (essentially the key to their immortality), was a perfect fit for the concept. A vampire’s charm ability allowed me the use of a Lord from 0e castle encounters, though transformed into a Renfieldesque slave.

The traps in the dungeon were something of a mental exercise. A test to see how far I was able push my creativity. I wanted to avoid traps like those found in later AD&D modules, and in supplements like Grimtooth. Instead I leaned towards the strange magical traps found in the labyrinths of the early Dungeon Game, circa 1976. I also enjoyed coming up with novel uses of standard spells in environmental traps. I recall the dungeon The Hyqueous Vault was very inspiring in this regard.

My favourite trap in the Barbican is a cursed magical room. In it, all forms of melee will totally miss unless the character throwing the attacks calls out their own name. I had originally come up with this idea whilst rereading Elric of Melniboné by Micheal Moorcock. The impetus for this trap was the scene where Elric battles pig faced creatures, who can only speak a single word, ‘thing.’ In this scene Elric becomes enraged and suddenly starts yelling his own name whilst smighting the mutated chaotic creatures.

Hopefully you Dungeon Masters out there will find the elements of the dungeon useful. Even if you have to get Burroughsian and give it the cut-up treatment.

I will soon be taking the material and ideas from the Barbican of Blood and creating a less brutal, but larger module intended for tournament play.

Thanks to Attronarch and never_plays_elves for reading the dungeon in its early stages. Thanks also to Goldigger who ran a play test of the Barbican, his play report can be found here. The largest thanks goes to Gogon Velvet who illustrated the villain on the cover page, which you can see below.

There are still a few Easter eggs hidden in the text, which are as yet are undiscovered. Can you find them?