GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

[mlangsdorf]

The dungeon portion is small, but very intense with LOTS of enemies. The PCs are pretty like to trip ~5*N orcs and assorted allies as soon as they enter, as the various guard rooms hear the fighting and come investigate. After the PCs clear that, there's N+4 Stone Golems down the hall, and roughly another 5*N skeletons and assorted nasty undead allies in the outer chamber.

That's a lot of combat for 4 hours. Combat length tends to scale with the square of the participants, so those waves of orcs and masses of skeletons could just take up all the time very easily without every reaching completion.

Instead, I'd probably focus on the sacred grotto, and add some physical obstacles to it*. Have the PCs arrive on Day 5, so a team has already gone through and added traps to it, and the PCs get ambushed by a rival on their way out. Throw in a (small) random encounter as the PCs approach, and you've got a pretty good 4 hour session.


* ie, add a long hallway somewhere and put a chasm that the PCs need to cross; make part of the corridor on two levels so the PCs have to climb up it, etc. Maybe add a rune-filled section (from DF2 Dungeons) with a turn-off switch on the far side, so the PCs have to send someone through to get past it safely.