The Shrine of Lethria

We've got our starting city, our band of degenerate murder hobos and a nearby temple. Let's say the temple is in the next hex over, so let's see what the environs look like, per AD&D DMG Appendix B.

I roll a d6 and get a 3 which means we're starting in the southeast (FYI - I decide 1 is north and continue clockwise since we don't really care in which direction the shrine lies). We roll on the wilderness table (pg 173) and get an 18 which means our lost shrine is in the swamp. Let's see if there's anything interesting in the hex. We roll a d100 get a 61 which means there's a shrine in this hex (how cool is that!? The dice gods know what they're doing!). Let's see if we've got any monsters lurking around the outside of the shrine.

Turning to AD&D DMG pg 47, we see that there's a 1 in 20 chance for an encounter in a relatively dense area (remembering that Valthrun is a city of 40,000 a mere mile away). We get a 12 so there are no further monsters encountered, beyond whatever we might find in the forbidden shrine.

I'm planning on using Appendix A to generate the dungeon beneath the shrine, so let's put some limit around the size. I roll a d4 for the number of levels and get a 4 so that's how deep it will go. I'm going to limit each level to a max of 20 rooms because I don't want to turn this into a megadungeon, mainly due to time constraints on my part.

Since we've described the beginning environment of our campaign, it's worth starting to flesh out our world map. Let's start with 1 hex = 1 mile and we can expand later if needed:

Hex 100,100 is our starting area that we rolled up previously and I've added icons for the city and the monsters living in the hex. The shrine is is in hex 101,101 and we've changes the terrain to a marsh. 

As described in the last post, I've decided Valthrun lies at a crossroads and is a trading hub since that's a reasonable explanation for the population of 40,000 humans that live here. What's in the remaining gray hexes? Who knows??? We haven't explored them yet and will populate them as the campaign progresses.

Next up: we generate dungeon level 1 and see if the murder hobos can survive to tell us more...