Welcome to the Temple of Dynss, plus some lamentations on creativity

My "Village of Longtooth" post got a little traffic in the last couple of weeks, mostly because Shane mentioned on his blog that he was cribbing it for his new campaign. Much appreciated...

Anyway, I got a comment lamenting that people didn't seem to post up '5-minute maps' and similar creative bits as much anymore, especially since the G+ diaspora. I thought on this, as well. At the time, my mind was much more attuned to creating, so I could see a map like Shane's, or a piece of art that someone posted, save it, and immediately draft up a few notes of description for that piece. Then I'd toss it out into the world, and maybe someone would find it and use it. Who knows. But it was more about creating and sharing for me than any other impetus. 

Now, I have a folder full of maps and ephemera covered in notes that never seem to get transcribed, or some inspiring piece gets lost in the feed and never found again. Gotta fix that.

Which brings us to the Temple of Dynss. Grab a small encounter space, set the timer for an hour, and fill it. Then make sure it gets written up.

Dyson themed it as a lost temple now occupied by a giant lizard, so I took the lizard theme, but gave it the lizardfolk treatment. Old lost temple? They must be returning to it to cause some mischief of their own agenda. Somewhere, I wrote down the random phrases 'smoking ruin' and 'spirit snake' as spells for our main character, a shaman. Wasn't sure, but they sounded like spells that he'd have. I roughed out a plot, pulled some images from Wikimedia, and created some hows and whys. 

Check out this dapper guy
source

(Although I didn't incorporate the image into the adventure, he's the inspiration for the shaman's guards)

So, an hour plus a few days later, we have our finished work. 

Welcome to the Temple of Dynss

An old temple/mausoleum, complete with a few modified monsters and undead, two new spells, and one new magic item.

Now to figure out how to grab the creative moments more often...

That said, as best as I can tell from my disorganized blog tags, I've written over a hundred adventures. Everything from a single-location encounter to large dungeons requiring multiple sessions (nothing in the mega-dungeon category, yet...). Several include four to five scenarios for a single map, so that adds a few more. Most are probably pretty bog-standard by most criteria, although I do let the mind out to play a bit more now and then... Anyway, they are all free, or at the most PWYW. I'm sure something will be suitable to drop into your table, or perhaps seed an idea of its own.