A couple of weeks ago, to pass the time in quarantine between the escalating parade of conference calls, I pulled my old Dungeons & Dragons starter set off the shelf and cracked open a book I got for Christmas (Tales Of The Yawning Portal) from Wizards Of The Coast. Obviously, most D&D packaged adventures are for groups of people and are designed to be led by a dungeon master. I hammered out a few guidelines for converting them to solo dealie-o’s and wrote about that here.

It was such a surprise how things turned out, and when the characters started to pop for me, I thought it would be fun to write and illustrate a short pdf of how the adventure turned out.  It was a far wilder ride than I’d anticipated, which is a rock solid testament to how powerful the D&D system really is and why it has such a special place in so many hearts.

The kind folks at NaturalCrit have graciously made available a tool able to publish documents that look almost exactly like the Wizards Of The Coast 5th edition D&D materials. It’s here, you should give it a try if you’re into that. It’s what I used to format the document.

There are over 20 custom illustrations inside, mostly done in Daz Studio, Photoshop, and a little Blender.

The adventure I chose was ‘The Sunless Citadel’, so the setting,  three of the characters, and the encounters are all drawn from that book. Not mine, and property of Wizards Of The Coast, completely.

The story though, that was pretty much all the roll of the dice. Sticking to the rules I’d outlined, I only read descriptions of rooms once I’d decided to enter. The dice decided whether something worked or not, and who lived or died. Seriously, things just went nuts with this.

For my very first game of Dungeons & Dragons way back in the day, my buddy was as clueless as I was about how to play and gave me my character’s name: Firebeetle. That’s the elf that led this delve into the Sunless Citadel.

I hope you like this adventure, as it was a pain and a joy to put together. I wish someone else was writing Firebeetle now, because he cracks me up, and I’d like to know where he goes next.

Maybe you can tell me.

Here’s the link to download Clueless In The Sunless Citadel.

Till next time!