Chapter 9: Exploring and Returning

In this chapter, you’ll think about the reasons your players have to explore and then return to your dungeon. You’ll go through activities to create a “treasure budget,” thinking through some interesting loot that tells a story about your setting’s lore. Then, you’ll telegraph the risks and rewards of your dungeon through hooks and rumors.

Incentives to exploration
Non-tangible rewards
Writing interesting treasure
1. Magical treasure
How much treasure should you put into a dungeon?
1. Calculating treasure for old-school games
What work is treasure doing?Theory
Activity: Create a treasure budgetActivity
Returning to the dungeon
Writing hooks and bounties
Writing rumors
1. False rumorsAdvice
Activity: Write bounties Activity
Activity: Create a rumor tableActivity
Further reading

Incentives to exploration

Thus far in this course, you have written traps, monsters, secret hiding places, and dungeon lords. What are all these hazards hiding? What are all these creatures hoarding?

Provide good reasons for adventurers to brave all of these dangers! This will include treasures mundane and magical, but can also include non-tangible rewards. We’ll discuss both in this chapter.

One of the most powerful incentives for exploration is an appeal to a character’s backstory. Link an adventurer’s personal quest, their goals, their vendettas, or their personal history to the dungeon. Your players will love it.

You’ll broadcast these incentives to the players using rumors and hooks.¹

Non-tangible rewards

Plot is always one incentive players have to go on adventures. Fight the bad guy, avert the ritual, rescue the princess. These are all perfectly reasonable reasons to explore.

Some rewards are a result of players figuring out how to best use dungeon features. Dungeon features are sometimes explicitly beneficial: a pool that removes curses or a shrine that confers blessings. Sometimes, these are just weird effects that players learn to twist to their advantage: a gigantic forge they use to dispose of skeletons or destroy a cursed ring.

Other reasons to explore can be somewhat abstract. The players can pursue certain quests to raise their standing with a faction, prove their worth to a certain NPC, or get information about a larger goal.

Writing interesting treasure

A dungeon also benefits from having some tangible benefits: proof that you came, you saw, you conquered.

Extracting treasure is one of the open-ended challenges in dungeon crawling. How will the players safely make it out with their loot? Forefront this tension by making treasure that is interesting in and of itself:

Treasure that has a value inside the dungeon: a resource needed by a certain NPC or faction
Treasure that provides a hint for puzzles or traps
Treasure that is difficult to extract because its large, unwieldy, or fragile

Provide a good mix of treasure in your dungeon: coinage, precious gems, pieces of art, historical artifacts, trade goods. The variety will create an interesting texture to the adventure, and nod towards “realism.”²

Treasure can include harvestable reagents and ingredients. These can be naturally occurring, like useful herbs and fungi growing in a particular area. These can also be part of your monstrous ecology: an umberhulk’s eyes can be sold as jewels, the venom of a basilisk can be extracted and used by the thief, the brains of an imp can be eaten to learn a new spell.

Use treasure to show off your lore. Art pieces might depict the scene of a historical event. Coins might have the faces of long-dead rulers depicted on them. Books might serve as Rosetta Stones that allow the translation of a forgotten language.

For example: Consider the magic swords held by the trolls in The Hobbit. The trolls did not make them, but stole them from other thieves. The swords have names (Orcrist! Glamdring! so cool) and a history dating back to the First Age, where they were forged for a war now forgotten by everyone except Elrond.

“Treasure Tells A Story”, Ben Robbins
There are lots of times during a game when players are half-listening, or thinking about other things, or maybe just wandering into the kitchen to get a soda. But in the magical post-combat pre-treasure window, everyone’s attention is high, their curiosity is piqued, and they are clamoring to hear what you will say next.
You want to show the players something? Put it in the form of treasure. Want to tell them about the history of the elves? Tell it through treasure. Want to tell them about the cult in the area? Tell it through treasure. Want them to give them a clue about the dangers that are three doors down? Tell it through treasure.³

Museums are great sources of inspiration. Museums remind us that the real world is stranger than fiction, with cultural artifacts running a wider gamut than any RPG writer could dream up. In a recent visit to a museum, I found treasures such as:

A torque used as a trading currency in the Yoruba culture (Nigeria, Republic of Benin)
A silver kovsh (traditional Russian drinking vessel) made by the Fabergé firm (Russia)
Shabits, small mummy-like figures designed to serve the entombed in the next world (Egypt, New King, Dynasty 18)
Cloak of duck feathers (modern, using traditional Mattaponi methods)

The only caveat is to not make things “too” interesting. Like with everything, there’s a need for balance. You have your players’ attention when you describe treasure: you’ll lose it when the description becomes a monotonous list of fifty pieces of (otherwise interesting) art they find in a single room. If museums are a good touchstone, let each treasure room in your dungeon be a museum, highlighting two or three pieces at a time.

Creating a sense of wonder
A good method to create something that feels fresh but understandable is to take something normal and “twist” it. What would be interesting treasure in our world (gold! gems!) becomes somewhat rote in fantasy adventure games. Put a twist on this treasure to create a sense of wonder for your players.
Perhaps a ruby is shaped (naturally?) like a heart. The literal heart of the mountain. Perhaps the gold is found in the poop of a rust monster; still valuable but kinda gross. Perhaps gold isn’t gold, but coin bugs (a trap!), whose carapaces can be harvested and sold to an entomologist.

Magical treasure

How many magic items you provide your players sets the tone of your campaign setting.

When rare, the campaign setting feels more grounded and realistic. Although, when distributed in a stingy manner, players can feel that a “realistic”² campaign is really just a slog where they can never catch a break.

When common, magic items provide the feeling that the world is fantastic or reflective of folklore, where miller’s sons find magic swords and old hermits in the wood are willing to dispense special charms against evil. Conversely, a myriad of magic can somewhat cheapen the experience of enchantment. “Ho hum, another magic sword.”

Ktrey’s d4Caltrops Random Tables Tools
One of the most prolific and gameable blogs is d4Caltrops, which is loaded with d100 tables for all sorts of things. It can be an invaluable tool for you as you create your dungeon. Importantly, many of these are tables of treasure, equipment, and magic items. Use them if you need inspiration during this chapter!

The best magic items play with contrasts, balancing these concerns.

Items of least enchantment might be somewhat common. These items have strange properties that make them interesting to use and solve problems in unique ways. These might also have a limited number of uses, letting them drop in and drop out of the campaign quickly.

More powerful magic items can be rare to emphasize their specialness. Like interesting treasure, these should be grounded in the history of your world. The best magic items are a mix of boons and banes: strong effects tempered by certain drawbacks. For example: a magic sword that deals great damage but must feed on blood every time it’s drawn. A fight against a skeleton will provide no blood. If used in such a combat, the player must be careful to feed the sword a bit of their own blood, or the sword will find a way to drink its fill.

Such magic items are also a good reason to experiment, with players needing to test the artifact out in different situations to understand the full extent of its powers.

One-trick magic: We should try to not hide the fantastical in our fantasy adventure games, especially at low-levels. It is exactly the reason people play! But Josh is correct: too much and it loses its impact. My solution often has been one-shot magic items. Classically these are potions and scrolls, but also could include powers, salts, or oils.
On one of my “I Search the Body” tables, I have a dagger that opens any door it’s stuck in automatically, but the dagger remains fused to the door. I also have pumpkin seeds that grow knee-high lit jack-o-lanterns, providing light, but if picked rot and die. In my Nightwick Abbey game, I have a candied thief heart which turns all the consumer’s d20 rolls into coin flips.
One-shot magic items allow for memorable effects (don’t do simple pluses) that don’t outstay their welcome.

How much treasure should you put into a dungeon?

Like stocking monsters, stocking treasure will vary a lot based on the game system that you’re running. A game like OD&D cares more about a budget for treasure in a dungeon than it strictly does about monsters because treasure is how you level up. In future editions, this consideration is mostly inverted.

In His Majesty the Worm, both your treasure and monster budget can be a little messy. Characters can (should) have lean times and surplus times. Ideally, characters should get a lot of treasure, go back to the City, spend all of it, and go back into the Underworld broke and penniless. This parallels the life cycles of stories like Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, who regularly win fabulous riches and begin most stories with empty pockets. A lot of mechanics in the game are there to enforce this genre convention.

Without getting into the specifics of numbers, here is a procedure to create a budget for treasure to place in your dungeon.

Imagine you are going to rate your adventurers from rank F to rank S.

Use your system’s baseline to guide how much treasure your players should get for exploring the entire level in an ideal state. Set that total at rank A: good, but not superlative.
In rank F, players don’t engage with anything in the dungeon, run from room to room, don’t explore, never solve any puzzles, never press their luck.
In rank S, they essentially clear the dungeon level, find every secret door, loot every chest, kick every monster’s ass.

As you place treasure room by room, place enough treasure for players to achieve rank A if they play thoughtfully. Put 20% extra treasure into places where your have the highest difficulty: secret rooms, puzzles, and dungeon lords.

For example, in OD&D, if you expect your party to level up after every dungeon, put enough gold for them to gain the next level in the “main path” of the dungeon. Then, add 20% extra treasure hidden in secret caches, guarded by particularly dead traps, and harvestable reagents inside the dungeon lord’s skull.

Because you expect your players to be able to skip some things and miss some hidden clues, it will generally come out in the wash. By finding most of the treasure, players will get what they need to feel rewarded for their exploration.

Calculating treasure for old-school games

Through the lens of systems employing 1 GP = 1 XP, you might need a little more hardline as to the amount of treasure. Also, if you are trying to convert an older TSR module or new OSR module to a dungeon-crawling system that doesn’t track advancement via coin, it might be helpful to understand what could be a significant amount of treasure that could constitute an “advancement unit.” Here’s a section that does the number crunching.

Here are steps, in brief, to calculate the amount of treasure (and dungeon size) required for leveling:

First, on average, 1-in-5 (1-4 on a d20) dungeon rooms contain treasure.

Second, a level 1 room/monster/trap containing treasure that has an average value of 600GP.

Third, 2000XP is the average XP needed to advance a PC from level 1 to 2. 8000XP is required to level a party of four from level 1 to level 2.

Finally, the number of treasure rooms required to level a party from 1 to 2 determines the size of the dungeon, assuming 1GP = 1XP.

So 8000XP (total party requirement to level) divided by 600GP (average GP per treasure room) = 13.3 treasure rooms which are found at a 1 to 5 ratio to normal rooms, so 13.3 times 5 equals ~66 total rooms.

“But wait, this series is about killing your PCs in only 30 rooms, not 66!” Correct. So this means two things. Either you increase the number of 30-room dungeons or increase the dungeon level to account for greater treasure value. Fortunately treasure room value scales with dungeon level: 600GP x [Dungeon Level] to keep pace with old-school PC leveling.

What work is treasure doing?Theory

Treasure incentivizes some of the core loops of exploration-focused adventure gaming. Treasure is the lure that tempts smart players into dangers that they would otherwise avoid entirely. When tracking encumbrance, treasure provides an interesting choice of what tools and resources adventurers give up to make room for their filthy lucre. Exploration carries the thrill of pushing your luck, as players take risks to go deeper into the dungeon to maximize their rewards.

And when the adventurers return to civilization, finding the right buyer for the different kinds of treasure they have to sell can be a problem-solving challenge in its own right.

Activity: Create a treasure budgetActivity

In this activity, you will brainstorm a variety of treasures and other rewards. This will be your treasure plan that you will use when you begin to populate your dungeon. In chapters 11-13, spend this budget to populate individual challenges with rewards.

Open the workbook that you created in chapter 2. Navigate to page 10: Treasure and Rewards. For each step, write your answers down here.

For each question, fill out the following details:

Loot: Give the loot a memorable name.
Location: Based on your previous work, you’ll probably already have some ideas of where this treasure might be hiding. If you don’t know yet, leave the Location sections blank for now.
Description: Write a short but evocative description of the object. Make each sentence punch!
Special Effects: If the item has a special property or magical power, use this space to describe how it works.

Do the calculations for treasure that your system needs as part of your work in this activity to make sure you’re achieving the goals of your game.
Because you already set some treasure into the dungeon lord’s lair, include those in your reckoning for this activity.

Step 1: Piece of art that tells a story

Write a description of a valuable art piece that tells the story of your setting or dungeon level.

Example:
tapestry that depicts the ancient treaty of elves and dwarves (worth 200g)
mural that shows the Sea Lords demanding tribute (the gems in the chests in the mural are real - pry them out to collect 500g in mixed precious stones)
copper armband shaped like a wolf biting its own tail, given by orcs as a betrothal gift (worth 80g)

Step 2: Treasure that’s hard to loot

Write a description of something valuable that’s hard to loot: something heavy, unwieldy, fragile, or embedded.

Example:
chalcedony statue of angel worth 800g, but weighs 1,000 lbs
glass sword worth 500g, but suffering a single point of damage while carrying it will destroy the sword to useless glass shards
sarcophagus of the Sea Lord worth 500g to an antiquarian, but requires four hands to carry out of the dungeon

Step 3: Harvestable loot

Write a description of something useful or sellable that needs to be harvested: animal, vegetable, or mineral.

Example:
pyrotechnic fungus explodes when introduced to fire; 2d4 uses always found in room 128
slimes can be rendered into potions; each slime you defeat can be carried in a hermetic jar and sold to the Alchemist’s Guild for 50g a piece
dungeon sloth pelts can be sold for 80g a piece

Power level of your setting
As you work through this exercise, consider your setting’s tolerance for the magical. For fantastic settings, some of this loot might be magical. For more grounded settings, they can be mundane but useful: medicinal, alchemical, or reactive.

Step 4: Consumable loot

Write a description of something useful but has limited uses.

Example:
tablet of holy writ functions as scroll of protection if read aloud (sellable for 50g if unused)
3 potions of levitation
if freed, the djinn will perform one lesser wish for the adventurers

Step 5: Enchanted item

Write a description of something magical. Associate the magic item with the story of your setting and your dungeon lore.

Example:
the silver hand of St. Ymily the Opener is a relic of the Pluraltine religion, grants the spell knock! to any true adherent once per day (worth 300g in raw silver, worth 10,000g or large writ of indulgence from the church)
a wig of living hair; will bond to the user’s head and serve as replacement hair - a cure for baldness! (cursed, attracts clowns)
+1 staff of oak topped with a carven owl - owl will animate once per month and return with rare rumors from the Parliament of Owls

Step 6: Treasure that creates a sense of wonder

Take a normal, standard piece of treasure. Then write a twist for that treasure that makes it feel fresh and wonderful.

Example:
rubies originally harvested from fire beetles deep under the earth
jade statues made to honor dogs who have passed, each marked with a name: Brave, Bark-Destroys-Evil, Face-Licker
coins minted with the face of the Last Emperor; to bear his sigil is illegal, making them hard to spend

Returning to the dungeon

There’s a thrill when not every beat of a story is perfectly gettable. The reader pauses and thinks, “I’ll come back to this later.” When used sparingly, the entire flow is enriched. An adventure is the same way.

We have already touched on some reasons to return in previous chapters:

Returning to solve optional puzzles when you have an “aha” moment
Returning to fight the dungeon lord once you’ve done research and preparation
Returning to benefit from dungeon features that you’ve unlocked

Exploration-focused games are improved when filled with these little loops. Getting treasures, returning to town, returning to the dungeon, finding new threats, being defeated by a trap, learning how to bypass the trap, using the trap against an enemy, and so on. These cycles represent a sense of accomplishment and mastery over things that were once dangerous.

Money, Fame, & Power: I think from an old-school perspective, one has to be careful about making a dungeon about a singular thing. This is because once that thing is accomplished, the dungeon loses its purpose in the wider campaign—it has been beaten or “100% cleared.” Now what has happened is that a lot of creative effort has gone down the drain as the location has the potential to not be visited again. This is also where special rooms and empty rooms come in handy.
I recommend thinking of the dungeon as an interesting place whose multifaceted rewards touch on money, fame, and power to various degrees. ⁴ While these are rather base, old-school PCs are often looking for some manifestations of all of those things, and for better or worse, IRL we are looking for those things too.

Cleared dungeons

A cleared dungeon is a kind of non-tangible reward. Allow dungeons to stay cleared to give players a sense of accomplishment and progression: they’re meaningfully reducing the dangers of the world by adventuring. By defeating the bandits of the forest keep, they’ve reopened a trade route with the wood elves. By defeating the kobolds of the upper mines, they’ve permanently made it easier to plumb the depths of Mount Dread.

Before/after state

Contrastingly, a cleared dungeon might not be “safe,” just different. The bandits are cleared from the forest keep, but the players opened the sarcophagus in the basement and unleashed the Locust Lich into the world. Now, the forest is denuded, and a new danger is at hand.

Use before/after states to keep spaces that players often travel continuously interesting. Players can retread familiar ground and be surprised at the impact of their choices on the world around them.

Restocking

Restocking creates the feeling that your dungeon is alive and dynamic. While unobserved, the mythic underworld’s gears turn. If an ogre is slain, a hidden room looted, or a rusty trap sprung, replace those entries with something new.

Without getting too into “running the dungeon” instead of “designing the dungeon” (and killing your party in 30 rooms or less), I advocate for spending an afternoon between games restocking the dungeon at the following speedbumps:

Whenever the adventurers retreat after a very short adventure (a “five minute adventuring day”)
Whenever the adventurers return to civilization

Ask yourself: How has the dungeon been changed by the player’s actions? Factions will refill their posts. Other factions will move into cleared rooms. Other adventurers will meet with success or failure. Revisit your random encounter tables (more on this in chapter 13) and replace any entries that the players have already encountered.

Don’t restock treasure (maybe): Treasure is one of the things that should have diminishing returns as the dungeon restocks. As treasure is stripped away, players are incentivized to delve deeper and deeper to afford their adventuring lifestyle. Elsewise, players will often just linger in the uppermost reaches of the Underworld, and long-term megadungeon campaign play can stagnate. As with everything, let your taste and good sense guide you here.

Writing hooks and bounties

Rumors, hooks, and bounties all exist outside the adventure itself. They are the tendrils the dungeon extends out into the wide world to tempt and tantalize unsuspecting adventurous types into itself.

Hooks⁵ are a tool to broadcast the incentives for exploration. They are the reason that adventurers descend into dark places and brave untold perils.

Published modules often have a list of hooks—a concession by the designer to try and summarize the reasons to explore they’ve buried in the adventure in a d6 table format. We are not creating a module for publication here, just a module for you and your friends. This gives you an enormous advantage.

Don’t create a randomized list of hooks. Instead, promote your reasons to explore in a context that appeals to your players. If there is a knight in your party, one of the treasures you hide might be the lost relic of a noble knight of old. Your draconic dungeon lord can be the same dragon that killed your dwarf player’s father.

Use hooks to make the dungeon delving experience feel personal. Tie the rewards of the dungeon to the adventurers’ overarching goals or their backstories.

A bounty is just a hook that someone is paying the adventurers to pursue. “Yon dungeon has a flask that is good to get” is a hook. “Go into yon dungeon to get ye flask for me, I shall give ye 100 gold for it” is a bounty.

Bounties are one of the ways your players have to get rewards. Factor bounties into your treasure budget.

Use bounties to make players feel like mercenaries taking jobs, oblige them to go into dangerous dungeons that they’d rather not explore on their own, and allow them to make a little extra cash for pushing their luck.

Writing rumors

Rumors are informational details about the contents, inhabitants, and history of the dungeon that players can discover before they begin the adventure. Rumors allow players to make some informed decisions during the preparatory stage of delving: what equipment to pack, what spells to prepare, what approach to take.

Rumors are a good source for clues, providing hints at details that are hidden, easy to miss, or potentially confusing.

Rumors are also a tool to set the tone of the adventure before the players even get there. Hearing the legends of Ivar the Blood-drinker let the themes of your dungeon play out in your players’ heads with anticipation while they’re still safe in town.

Rumors can also be a reason to return. They can provide context for players that something was missed or left incomplete.

In contrast to hooks, I think rumors are fun to randomize. A random rumor table allows you to create rumors ranging from unhelpful to extremely helpful, then let the dice decide what the players learn. Create a rumor table to provide an edge of chaos to the way players collect information in preparation for an expedition.

Use rumors to provide a reward for players who do a little reconnaissance before they begin delving, establish some baseline facts about the dungeon, and provide clues to help players interact with hidden details.

False rumorsAdvice

Historically, rumors in D&D have ranged from outright false to bizarrely candid. Here is why I think false rumors are a poor inclusion in your game.

I’ve said it many times during this course, but it bears repeating: games are interesting because they give interesting choices to the players. Rumors are a way to broadcast information to players about things their characters haven’t discovered yet, which helps frontload the interesting choices they have to make.

Because of that, use false rumors sparingly, if at all. Players can’t determine the reality of rumors until they enter the dungeon. When rumors are false and believed, the repercussions for adventurers can be dire. After that happens once or twice, a “once bitten twice shy” effect happens for players. Rumors are no longer meaningful ways to give hints about the dungeon and broadcast information: they’re lies told by the GM to ensnare unwitting players. Rumors now have the opposite of their intended effect.

This isn’t to say you can’t have partially true rumors or rumors with distorted facts. But, like good riddles, partially true rumors should be obvious in retrospect. “Aha, they said that this cave was haunted by ghosts, but it was really just Old Man Cooter dressing up as a ghost to scare away the locals!”

False rumor alternative: untrustworthy NPCs: When a group of strangers roll into town looking for a big score, it’s not going to be the law-abiding, good people who first approach this band of armed, taboo-breaking weirdos looking to desecrate snake-folk ruins. It’s going to be people of dubious morals looking for scapegoats and fall-guys. Here hooks, rumors, and objectives can still be communicated and are found in the dungeon, but the consequences remain unclear to players.

Activity: Write bounties Activity

In this activity, you’ll write six bounties or hooks to call your players to adventure. You might imagine that each bounty is a posting on an adventurer’s job board. Alternatively, the source of the bounty might be an established NPC, quest giver, or mentor for your players.

If six hooks/bounties feels like a lot, you do not have to use all of them in your game. As with many of these activities, having many ideas and sorting through to find the good ones is our goal today.

Navigate to page 29: Hooks, Rumors, and Bounties. You’ll use this page for both this activity and the next. For each step, write your answers down here.

Write a sentence or two for each of the following prompts:

Step 1: Fetch quest

Describe something in the dungeon (a treasure or something more mundane) that someone wants
Who is asking for this?
Name a non-monetary reward they’ll exchange: a favor, information, or rare piece of equipment

Step 2: Side quest

Describe a task that doesn’t have anything to do with “plot”
Who is asking for this?
What do they offer as a reward? Money or something else?

Step 3: High risk

Describe a dangerous task that forefronts one of the main perils of the space
Who is asking for this?
What valuable thing do they offer as a reward? A high sum of money, a rare boon, or something that furthers the PC’s goals?

Step 4: No reward

Describe a task that has no hope of reward
Why would the players bother? Does the task pull on their heart strings, seem worthy in and of itself, or something else?
Who is asking for this?

Step 5: Fight

Describe a task that necessitates a fight
Who is asking for this?
What do they offer as a reward? Money or something else?

Step 6: Ups the ante

Describe a challenge that fundamentally changes the way the adventurers would approach dungeon delving
Who is asking for this?
What do they offer as a reward? The reward should be commensurate with how strange or dangerous this challenge would be.

Activity: Create a rumor tableActivity

Next, you’ll write six rumors that players can potentially hear about your dungeon.

Write a sentence or two for each of the following prompts:

Write a rumor about a monster the players can encounter
Write a rumor about a trap
Write a rumor about something an NPC wants or gives
Write a rumor a treasure the players can find
Write a rumor that gives the players context about the dungeon
Write a rumor about something hard to discover

If you want to read my entries for this chapter’s activities, here’s my…
Treasure budget
Hooks, rumors, and bounties

Wrapping up

Between chapters 6 and 9, you’ve been checking off your dungeon checklist: your reasons to explore, talk, fight, flee, breathe easy, experiment, be surprised, and return. Great job! Your players are going to have so much fun because of your hard work.

In the final chapters of this course, you’ll start placing your ideas onto your map and connecting them together.

Chapter 9: Exploring and Returning

Table of contents

Incentives to exploration

Non-tangible rewards

Writing interesting treasure

Magical treasure

How much treasure should you put into a dungeon?

Calculating treasure for old-school games

What work is treasure doing?Theory

Activity: Create a treasure budgetActivity

Step 1: Piece of art that tells a story

Step 2: Treasure that’s hard to loot

Step 3: Harvestable loot

Step 4: Consumable loot

Step 5: Enchanted item

Step 6: Treasure that creates a sense of wonder

Returning to the dungeon

Cleared dungeons

Before/after state

Restocking

Writing hooks and bounties

Writing rumors

False rumorsAdvice

Activity: Write bounties Activity

Step 1: Fetch quest

Step 2: Side quest

Step 3: High risk

Step 4: No reward

Step 5: Fight

Step 6: Ups the ante

Activity: Create a rumor tableActivity

Wrapping up

Further reading

What are some good magic items that I can place in my dungeon?

How do you make “common” magic items feel unique?

When should I restock a dungeon (if at all)?

How do I quickly restock a large dungeon?

Where’s the nuance on false rumors and partially true rumors?