The Contested Factory

The Hook: Spiders of highly varied description (fleshy! metal! humanoid! undead! all the above!) have been raiding other dungeon areas. Both prisoners and materials (steel items, especially) have been taken. Can someone go and thwart these evil spiders?

Description only gets longer from here... Scroll way way down if you just want to grab the files! 😅

The Truth: This section of the dungeon was an observation post and robot factory placed by extraterrestrials. The factory no longer works, but the spider-shaped robots hold on, hoping to someday report their centuries of findings to their missing masters. A tribe of SPIDER-GOBLINGS* and a group of DRIDERS are both trying to take over the area. All three factions will court adventurers, or fight if provoked. Or both!

Just for the record, it's the DRIDERS that take prisoners. They then drain them of blood at their leisure and throw out the bodies. Sometimes they sell the desiccated corpses to some of the more broken-down robots, who replace metal struts with bones as a poor man's repair technique. It's all part of the complicated (implied) situation in the dungeon!

* Yes, GOBLINGS, not GOBLINS. That's not a typo. GOBLINS tend to be a little more... uniform... in appearance. GOBLINGS are more "fugly yet awesome 1980s British RPG illustration."

Speaking of which, the SPIDER-GOBLINGS are in a pretty sad state. Their shaman-chief used a spell to determine this area had no living or undead inhabitants, so they declared this place a "promised land" and moved in the whole tribe. Of course, robots aren't living or undead. Then the DRIDERS showed up, and BLOOD-WRAITHS were formed in the wake of the resulting battles...

Meanwhile, the poor robots just want to protect their last data center, centuries after running out of spare parts. Let's not talk about their fellows that they cannibalized for bits....

Good for both starting and experienced adventurers. If converting to another system besides Quarrel + Fable, experienced characters are probably better. DRIDERS are no joke, and neither are robots. 

Regardless of system, PCs should always consider running away when in too much danger, as this is a pretty old-school crawl. More experienced characters will run less if they choose to fight. Clever players of any power level can do a lot with talking.

Written for Sean Smith's Quarrel + Fable , licensed under CC by 4.0

This means it should be easy to run with similar games, such as Troika!, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Warlock!, Denizen! or Fight and Sorcery!

And possibly a few other games with exclamation marks in their titles.

"The Contested Factory" is an independent production of Ivanhoe Unbound / Kirt A. Dankmyer and is not affiliated with Chitin Press. "The Contested Factory" is licensed / sharable under CC by 4.0

Actual text is only 750 words long.... Much more terse than this description!

Robot spider cover image is by Dee Shadowhawk under a CC BY-NC 3.0 license

This is a submission for the Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam and accordingly the map is designed to link into a larger dungeon map, geomorph-style.

Map created with help of donjon 

I have another entry for the Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam, please check it out!