Dungeon of Leaves
A procedurally generated crawl in five explorations through an interpretive labyrinth
Happy October, pals! I wanted to release something spoooooky that I worked on over the summer with the encouragement of one of my gaming groups. A bit ago, my friend Melzer and I were talking about how fun it would be to play a classic D&D dungeon crawl, but with one that had more modern, cinematic-style D&D 5e storytelling as a backdrop. Immediately I started thinking about how, in the most pure version of a story-centric dungeon crawl, the crawling the dungeon would be the story, and that immediately got me thinking about the book House of Leaves.
If you’re not familiar, House of Leaves is this wild, mindbending novel about a family that moves into a house where the internal measurements don’t match the external ones. It’s also about a tattoo artist in Los Angeles on a permanent bender who finds a labyrinthine manuscript written by an old, blind Greek man. It’s about a lot, really, though it’s definitely not about a minotaur. It’s impossible to explain the magic of House of Leaves, except that it’s a book where the act of literally reading it becomes a challenge, and how you choose to approach the text metaphorically and physically changes how you feel about it. Like the characters in the story, you’re crawling through an endless dark dungeon potentially of your own devising. That sounds like D&D to me!
So I spent some time putting together a system for a procedurally generated dungeon crawl inspired by House of Leaves, played it with my group, and wrote it up so I could share it with you all here. I think it’s pretty neat! I’d have loved to sell it, honestly, but it’s so derivative that it just wasn’t worth figuring out how to strip away all the stuff belonging to other people that I used (not just the novel but the fact that it’s set on the D&D plane of Theros, that it uses the board from HeroQuest as its basic map, etc.). But I put enough work into it that I wanted to put it out there, in case it inspires someone else!
If you dig this, it would be really rad if you wanted to subscribe to my Substack, and if you really dig it, maybe consider a paid subscription? I’m going to release at least one piece of gaming content each month (I’ve actually got two planned for October) plus other various writings, mostly because I love doing this and it’s fun. But also, it’s hard out there, you know? Any way about it, though, thanks for your time.
Full PDF at the bottom. Hope you enjoy Dungeon of Leaves. Don’t get lost!
From the module introduction:
It’s hard to say when exactly stories began circulating of the King and his curious palace on Whalestoe Isle. Word seemed to come first in minuscule scraps of parchment that survived the turbulent waters of the Siren Sea to reach the scholars of the Meletian Peninsula, who postulated theses and antitheses in an ouroboros of academia without managing to ever come to the syntheses that they so desperately sought. The rumors came next, furtively passing through the land’s trade routes like a whisper hitting just the right angles of architecture to amplify itself down a hallway. By the time you heard it, the basics of the story had established themselves, as so many stories in Theros do, as a bedrock of fact hiding just beneath an equivocal floor, like a house built on a shaky foundation.
Here is what is more or less known: blind King Zampano has built for himself and his queen an opulent palace on Whalestoe Isle. That palace contains architectural features that should not be possible – namely, that the vaults underneath are said to be larger than the ground upon which the palace has been built. This curiosity has attracted several adventuring parties, who assume something wondrous must await in those vaults – treasure, magic, perhaps a chance to commune with a god. To your mind, many of those adventuring parties have not returned. The few individuals who say that they have carry minds torn to pieces; the common assumption is that those unfortunate souls have never even journeyed to the Isle and instead have fallen prey to the impossible geometry of the story itself, to which their weakened psyches are especially susceptible.
And yet… sew together enough disparate threads of narrative, and you possess the beginnings of an attractive tapestry. A tapestry that promises a glorious destiny, perhaps, to a hero whose image is yet missing from it. Surely there’s no reason to worry that in all the tales you’ve woven together, whatever sits at the center of this serpentine tapestry is also nowhere to be seen, a yawning black absence that the light of your meditation cannot penetrate. Surely.
And so, independently of each other, you adventurers, green with experience but red with something to prove, have chartered passageway across the Siren Sea, intent on conquering the mystery of the curious palace on Whalestoe Isle.
