The Curse of Doors: D10 Rooms Part 1

I got a chance to run the start of my curse of doors concept at the table and I am super excited about it. The players found the necklace in a room in a small dungeon they were going through. Despite the clear risks a player picked it up and I rolled a 12 on my d20 so +2 means they are going to need to open 14 brand new doors and enter in to the weirdness and insanity through those doors to rid themselves of the curse.

I used some individual rooms from modules and megadungeons I was interested in, some of which I wanted to run for them in the future and some that I did not think I could fit in easily. I had specifically selected some because of the interesting sorts of interactions and experimentations that were in the room. Some I moved nearby doors, that existed in the room as described in the modules, around to allow a bit more exploring about the area without them immediately moving around. Some things that I quickly noticed about this sort of system is that there was some narrative tension between wanting a sort of pacing of an ebb and flow to the rooms they discovered even as they were somewhat random versus wanting something procedurally generated where I am getting some of that same sort of discovery as the players.

With that in mind I thought it would be cool if I started creating sets of 10 cool and interesting rooms to explore whenever I get the creative urge. I used the procedural adventure sections of the Labyrinth The Adventure Game as an idea for the direction for the sort of design I want to do. There will be a brief setup to the place and then some tables of ways to flavor the place randomly or not so randomly as needed.

1. A monarch's coronation.
2. The top of a wizard's tower.
3. An ancient barracks in the middle of a megadungeon.
4. A kitchen in the midst of preparing a great feast.
5. A colossal room, sand dunes stretching as far as the eye can see.
6. A ship far out at sea.
7. A prison.
8. A crypt in a necropolis.
9. A store in the Grand Bazaar.
10. A ruined castle in the sky.

1. A monarch's coronation. The door opens at the far end of a cathedral. A bishop is in the act of crowning the new monarch of the realm. Everyone turns to look at the adventuring party when they enter. 

Complications: 

1. The crown jewels, plenty of valuable ceremonial items, rich finery, and religious relics may be up for grabs.
2. Vampire nobles.
3. Plenty of royal guards are around, suspiciously eyeing the newcomers.
4. A court wizard looks at the player characters knowingly.
5. The monarch's brother is moments away from attempting to enact a coup with conspirators throughout the audience. 
6. The monarch is the spitting image of one of the player characters.

Extra Weirdness:

1. The monarch and their subjects are anthropomorphic animals.
2. Everyone is blindfolded except the bishop.
3. A Fae monarch.
4. The cathedral is open to a blood red sky.
5. Seating for the subjects watching is organized in a maze of some sort.
6. Cathedral is filled with mirrors.

Exit Doors:

1. The other end of the cathedral with a door going into a side chapel. 
2. At the top of the stairs leading to the belfry. 
3. A tomb door in the crypts of the cathedral.
4. The adventuring party entered from the side chapel near the front, the nearest door is at the narthex, at the main entrance of the cathedral.
5. A ceremonial door incorporated in to the theology worshiped at this cathedral.
6. A living door, a noble of house Portico, witnessing the coronation. It would be highly rude to use them without their permission.

2. The top of a wizard's tower. The party tumbles out of the trapdoor in the ceiling. The wizard has just completed the complex ritual to summon and bind a demon. The wizard will be mostly distracted in making sure the demon stays bound. In fact she may believe that they are in league with the demon as this occurrence seems like too much of coincidence.

Complications: 

1. There are plenty of magical traps and safeguards that have been put in place throughout the room that can be controlled with control levers from a central area near the wizard.
2. The wizard has enchanted their furniture and tools to be animated.
3. The demon promises the adventuring party power, wealth, removal of the curse it senses on them, etc.
4. The wizard has a group of apprentices, new to magic and unsure of themselves.
5. The room is full of magical contraptions: esoteric, complex, inscrutable, dangerous, and chaotic.
6. Charged magic is flying everywhere as a magical storm rages outside and the demon attempts to break their binding circle with magic as the wizard attempts to contain it.

Extra Weirdness:

1. Inert magical golems and homunculi are everywhere.
2. Potions, potions, potions.
3. The wizard is extremely young, arrogant, and ambitious seeming; like they may be dealing with more than they can handle.
4. A massive telescope and its many lenses dominates the room.
5. The demon is actually an angel.
6. The floor of the room is clockwork gears.

Exit Doors:

1. In the kitchen at the bottom of the dumbwaiter.
2. Inside the wizard's magical trunk. It's bigger on the inside.
3. It is the doorway back to Hell within the magic binding circle.
4. A book on the wizard's shelf is a book of portals that may be entered in to.
5. At the bottom of a long winding stair down from the tower.
6. On the next floor, it is currently open and leading to the rest of the wizard's tower.

3. An ancient barracks in the middle of a megadungeon. The party enters though a door in the middle of the barracks. The barracks is filled with every type of weapon imaginable and they are in a well kept state. The room is haunted by the soldiers who once barracked here, cursed to maintain their station for eternity. 

Complications: 

1. The ghosts will beg the party to find the remains of their captain and return them to this barracks so that he may dismiss them.
2. The ghosts fight an eternal war against an invading army of ghosts.
3. They were betrayed to their deaths, they want revenge.
4. The ghosts want to be payed their wages, all of them.
5. Politics caused the soldiers to be abandoned and forgotten here.
6. The ghosts betrayed their cause and have been cursed to be here.

Extra Weirdness:

1. There is an entire army barracked in this room, they are just all tiny.
2. They speak an ancient, dead language.
3. They are actually all one entity acting as a ghostly hivemind at this point.
4. The ghosts act out their lives in reverse.
5. The ghosts are from many different units, each avowing the supremacy of their company.
6. One member of the company has been pretending to be a ghost this whole time. They are very ancient but do not look it.

Exit Doors:

This is a megadungeon, there are doors everywhere however they might be trapped. The door is trapped by...

1. Swinging hammer.
2. More curse of door- add 1d4 numbers to the current count.
3. Secret trapdoor beneath their feet. They got lucky if all their party fell through together.
4. Door mimic. If killed, acts as a door.
5. Teleport spell. Teleports the person who touches it to somewhere nearby.
6. Alarms. The door is covered in metal and bells that make an extremely loud racket when the door is used.

4. A kitchen in the midst of preparing a great feast. The party intrudes upon the busy kitchen workers out of a backroom. The head chef is not pleased about being bothered by strangers.

Complications: 

The food is for...

1. A wedding.
2. A secret planning meeting for something nefarious or sensitive, an invasion perhaps?
3. The less advantaged. Nobles give freely from their stock in showy displays to outdo one another.
4. An evil villain retreat.
5. Deities. This is a feast for the gods.
6. A noble's menagerie.

Extra Weirdness:

The food is...

1. Bugs.
2. Books. 
3. Rock.
4. Liquids with place cards describing their taste.
5. Imaginary? The serving bowls appear to all be empty.
6. Impossibly delicious. One taste and that character will need to be dragged away from it.

Exit Doors:

1. Do cabinets count as doors?
2. Swinging kitchen doors.
3. The hearth.
4. Servant entrance in the back.
5. Interior manor doors. Will open for the residents, true servants, and those that ask them politely.
6. Door to the greenhouse out back.

5. A colossal room, sand dunes stretching as far as the eye can see. The doorway the adventuring party entered out of is on a wall reaching up to a ceiling that can barely be discerned. Some sort of phosphorescent objects on the ceiling give the illusion of a moon and stars and yield barely enough light for careful navigation.

Complications: 

1. Sandstorms every few minutes, shifting the sands and exposing ruins.
2. Sand worms.
3. An oasis community. Xenophobic.
4. Sand burrowing insects.
5. The sand is slowly draining through a hole in the middle of the desert.
6. Extreme temperature changes precipitated by the sound of a bell ringing.

Extra Weirdness:

1. Colossal salt pillars reach up to the ceiling. 
2. A trade caravan using giant sand moles as pack animals.
3. The sand can be shaped into objects and when it is spit on, it turns completely into that object.
4. Water touching the sand immediately freezes. It still feels hot down here.
5. Sentient fungi travel far overhead in the twinkling phosperesence.
6. A loud, continual grinding noise is heard.

Exit Doors:

1. In the hermit's house.
2. In the ceiling. How will they get up there?
3. Buried halfway beneath the sand.
4. In the ancient pyramid.
5. On the distant, opposite wall from where the party entered.
6. A house of doors, long forgotten by time down here.

6. A ship far out at sea. Use the exit doors for an entrance door as well.

Complications: 

1. Pirates are attacking the vessel.
2. A storm is raging.
3. They are chasing some form of nautical megafauna.
4. There is no food left aboard. The crew is drawing straws.
5. The crew is attempting a mutiny.
6. One of the crew members just burst into seaweed. They were a merfolk spy. Now the crew realize anyone could be a merfolk spy.

Extra Weirdness:

1. A hundred dead albatrosses litter the deck of the ship. No one will touch them or talk about them.
2. The ship is sailing the void rather than the sea.
3. The crew is entirely made up of clockwork automatons.
4. The crew refuse to talk. Only the captain and their officers will talk or respond to questions.
5. Undead crew.
6. It is a clockwork submarine, not a ship.

Exit Doors:

1. Captain's cabin.
2. Door to below deck.
3. The ship's magazine.
4. Gun ports.
5. Galley.
6. Trap door into the crow's nest.

7. An extremely large prison. The party emerges from their previous door into a cell. It may be tricky exiting the cell because the door is now a portal.

Complications: 

1. Prison riot.
2. Prisoners are attempting an escape using the room the party entered.
3. No guards. Prisoners police themselves.
4. Very clique-y. Many gangs.
5. Guards and warden are corrupt and merciless.
6. The warden is in the process of decimating the prison population.

Extra Weirdness:

1. Magical null prison meant to house magic users.
2. Panopticon
3. Fae prison. The Faerie legal system is no joke.
4. The prison only has one prisoner.
5. Extradimensional prison. Prisoners and guards are from another world, another plane.
6. The prison is clearly facing budget cuts.

Exit Doors:

So many locked doors in a prison. A nearby door is:

1. The warden's office.
2. A guard station.
3. The hospital wing.
4. Solitary confinement.
5. Beneath the prison
6. Iron maiden. 

8. A crypt in a necropolis. A mysterious nighttime fog drifts over the city of the dead. The party enters by climbing the stairs out of a crypt.

Complications: 

1. The dead are rising.
2. A cult is performing ancient and mysterious ceremonies here.
3. A funerary procession is occuring.
4. A noble's burial is occuring where their spouse is being forcibly entombed alive with them.
5. The undead come here to socialize. They are throwing a ball.
6. Way too many grave robbers.

Extra Weirdness:

1. The dead are entombed in a way that they can be seen by mourners.
2. Every gravestone and crypt has the same name, birth date, and death date. The cause of death and memories of the deceased are the only things that change.
3. The adventuring party find graves that appear to be their own.
4. The necropolis is run by beauracrats. Mountains of paperwork is littered everywhere.
5. The necropolis stretches as far as the eye can see. Is all of reality here a place to bury the dead?
6. Thousands of feral cats stalk the necropolis. 

Exit Doors:

1. Doors to crypts.
2. Gravedigger's house.
3. Gate into the necropolis.
4. There are doors in the tunnels that connect the graves and crypts of the necropolis.
5. The artistic display that is meant to evoke the door to the afterlife.
6. The ritual doors on each coffin that allow the buried to leave if they were mistakenly interred alive.

9. A store in the Grand Bazaar. The party enters from a shop in the Bazaar.

Complications: 

1. The Sultan's guards are patrolling this section of the Bazaar.
2. The Golden Sultan recently visited. The merchants here, those that have not become lunatics, are traumatized. None of them will be the same again.
3. The adventuring party will be ignored unless they follow the local rules and customs of this area of the Bazaar. To the letter.
4. The store is being robbed.
5. The merchant forcibly sells their store to the party.
6. The merchants are in the process of forming an illegal cartel.

Extra Weirdness:

1. The merchants at every store in this area of the Bazaar appear to be the same person.
2. The merchants will aggressively try to sell everything they can to the party.
3. The shops are completely identical except for one item.
4. Reverse monks.
5. Distorted, ambient music can be heard everywhere in this part of the Bazaar. No one knows where it comes from but every merchant has a specific song they can not stand.
6. This section of the Bazaar is an exact copy of one of the adventuring party's markets from back home.

Exit Doors:

1. Another shop.
2. Door shop.
3. Backroom door.
4. Information kiosk door.
5. Bathhouse door.
6. A statue in the middle of a fountain is a door.

10. A ruined castle in the sky. It is drifting slowly above the clouds. The party emerges, here, through the main doors of the castles.

Complications: 

1. The castle is infested with sky spiders.
2. A wizard is attempting to pilot the ruined castle.
3. A dragon is attacking the sky castle.
4. Sky pirates are invading.
5. The ruined castle is used as a staging ground for a noble's ambitious plans.
6. The floating island the castle is on, is being boarded by Imperial Customs Agents.

Extra Weirdness:

1. The castle is one of the few things that remain of this plane after it was shattered long ago.
2. The castle can shift between planes.
3. Castles on sky islands in this world are actually living. This one was dying.
4. Sky island castles are considered fixer-uppers. Ambitious and naïve nouveau riche are attempting to fix it.
5. Castle is a motte-and-bailey castle.
6. Castle and island are of Fae origin but have, maybe, made it away from Faerie?

Exit Doors:

1. Oubliette.
2. A door to the highest tower.
3. Trapdoor deep beneath the castle. It normally is used as a way to dump trash off the island without traveling to the edge of the sly island.
4. A smaller island drifts nearby this one. The only thing on that island is a mysterious door.
5. The missing doors of the castle piled up into a heap in the dungeon.
6. Animated door brought to life by the wizard who owned this floating island long ago. Dislikes others who use them. Tries to run away from those wishing to use them.

I hope this is a useful resource for people even if they only use it for its inspiration/spark tables. I know I will be using it for any of the people in my campaigns who are afflicted with the Curse of Doors or even just if they open a random portal.

I hope to do even more of these as they are very fun to write. So far they have been very fantasy and magical, but I would like to branch out to rooms for modern and other eras. I will try to pick a day to write some more of these so that I can continue to write on other ideas and projects here. (I want to eventually write 1000 at about this level of minimalism and complexity but we will see if that happens at all...)

Art used here is AI art from midjourney if that was not immediately obvious: the AI art generators all do seem to have their little tells.