Curious Dungeon #1 - The Temple of Oyraka

Normally when designing i start with an idea. With a story to tell. When running fantasy games i always ask myself. Where do i want my party to go and what do they want to do there, way before i ask my self what this place looks in detail. I wanted to break out of this routine and try something else. I sat down and drew a Dungeon map. I had nothing in mind while drawing it, i didn't ask myself questions about the place or the layout, i did not want to know what was inside the rooms and who lived there.

I posted the Dungeon map about two weeks ago with the promise to finish it up within a week. whoops. At least it's done now. I finished the Details of the map and here it is. Curious Dungeon Number 1. The Temple of Oyraka.

I randomly determined what this Dungeon will be. I used the tables i created for rolling through regions and found out that this was a submerged Temple inhabited by Lizardfolk. I did not quite stick to the premise as i decided that the temple was abandoned, but the Lizardfolk left their mark on this place.

But what is inside? The first room was huge, so it obviously needed a Statue. The Dungeon Alphabet by Michael Curtis provided many inspirations for this Dungeon, its arrival at my doorstep was one of the reasons i made this dungeon. It has a quite neat table for creating random statues, so i used it to roll out the table in Area 1-2 and 2-6. The Altars in Area 1-7 got randomized in a similar fashion. But there were still many rooms left empty.

It was quite easy to determine the former use of most of the rooms but for some i had to randomly determine a use. At this point i just looked at any table i could find for inspiration. Room by Room the Dungeon came together. I stopped rolling out random things and just picked what i liked out of this book and many other resources i could find in my bookshelf.

Here is the result. The Temple of Oyraka.

If the Hyperlink is not working just follow this link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NJDRr0_w-FqRCvSVEUh8o5ZEbSErY48d

I liked the idea of having the Dungeon set inside a lake. So i did it. It was submerged anyway, right? Now one question was left to answer: Why should adventurers go into this Dungeon? A mighty artifact had to be placed inside this Dungeon. I found no good spot to hide it. No room that made for a nice final room. So i placed it in the entrance and made a journey through the entire Dungeon necessary to retrieve it.

Writing this Dungeon down was way more work than designing it and i did not expect it to take this long. But i did learn a lot from this and be ensured that this won't be the last curious Dungeon.