Welp! I didn't get nearly as much done this year as I would've liked to, largely just because of mid-year procrastination. Then when I finally got my drive back in the waning months of the year, I had other creative responsibilities that limited my ability to catch up. I admit, I was also disheartened by the release of 5.5e, which I still haven't read in any detail.
I'm currently about halfway through updating the rooms for level 3. Level 2 is mostly done--I just need to write more about the various cults and add some more treasure. Oh! I decided a couple months ago that Brinefathom will be a GP-for-XP affair, so even with 5e's relatively low XP threshholds, I had to go back and add a lot of treasure. I also started writing the front matter for eventual publication and began populating the island-surface hexcrawl.
If you want to follow someone who's still doing cool daily stuff, I strongly recommend @fishrpg! His blues-themed setting Shadows in the Cotton already has a ton of interesting content, and he's working on polishing and expanding it into a publishable state next year.
In the mean time, thanks to everyone who's bounced ideas around with me this year, especially Fish and the members of the London-in-the-Air discord. Here's hoping I have more updates for you in 2026!
2024 is over, and Brinefathom Caves is done...ish. The content is there, but it's not really playable in its current state, both because the information is scattered across 366+ Tumblr posts and because I deliberately avoided putting hard stats on anything to avoid getting bogged down. My goal for 2025 is to edit this beast into a playable state, with eventual (e)publication in mind. The finished project will be PWYW--it's nice if someone wants to kick a couple bucks my way, but I'd rather get played than get paid, y'know?
As a proof of concept for this, I've rewritten all the level 1 rooms to a more user-friendly format with stated DCs for checks and saves. Below is a link to a Mega folder with the resulting PDF. It's still very much a work in progress--I haven't done an editing pass beyond spellcheck, for instance.
→ → GET LEVEL 1 HERE ← ←
The list of specific things I want to do this year include:
Rewrite the rest of the dungeon rooms in this format
Create clean digital copies of all maps
Write faction and NPC information for levels 2-6
Expand the minidungeons in the level 4 wavecrawl with playable rooms
Create a small hexcrawl for the surface of the island
Detail the island's port town and some NPCs who live there
Create stats for unique monsters and NPCs
Write procedures for the megadungeon play elements that 5e lacks, like dungeon turns
Probably some other stuff I haven't even thought of yet
So that's, uh, a lot! We'll see how my work ethic holds up without the day-to-day pace of dungeon24, but finishing made me pretty confident in my ability to handle the kind of workload that comes with a large dungeon.
One thing I'm not sure I'll do is go back and do full-map roundups of the lower levels. I really fell off doing that at some point, sorry. Right now, I want to move forward trying to get everything shipshape for publishing rather than spend time on more intermediate content. However, if anyone really missed having those roundups, please let me know. If there's demand for it, I'll happily do the extra work.
If anybody uses material from Brinefathom (especially from the PDF above, but also just in general), I'd love to hear your feedback! I lack the time and resources to playtest a megadungeon, so while I'm doing my best in editing--I swear past me forgot the difference between 4e and 5e encounter balance half the time--having outside perspectives is a huge help.
Finally, thanks again to everyone who followed along for the past year of dungeoncraft. Whether you started reading in January or December, you all made doing this so much more rewarding.
d10 | Rumor
01 | Vulture-Eye Vertin’s first mate is contemplating mutiny (T)
02 | The Brine Vultures’ cook pays good money for unusual meats (T)
03 | Returning all the missing statue faces will stop the dead from rising (F)
04 | The Brine Vultures keep a mimic in their treasure room (T)
05 | The huge dried-out fish will come back to life if immersed in water (T)
06 | There’s a secret crypt down the demon’s stairs (T)
07 | Only deaf people can understand the secrets of the screaming pillar (F)
08 | The statues around Traziver Gussel’s body animate to stop tomb robbers (T)
09 | A magical flower garden is hidden next to one of the temples (T)
00 | Only one staircase connects this level to level 2 (T)
As keeping with the general mundanity of the first part of this dungeon, this encounter table is pretty basic. The Brine Vultures take up almost half the list because, the PCs are in their house. And then the rest of the table is mostly your standard giant/swarm animals, plus a few encounters that hint at what's going on in nearby dungeon sections.
I'm still looking for a way to make tables look less crappy. If anyone reading this knows how to put tables in tumblr posts (beyond just inserting them as images) please let me know! Trying to make a dungeon without tables is hard, y'all.
The Brine Vultures are an ex-pirate crew that currently control travel in and out of the main entrance to the Brinefathom Caves. Racially, they’re mostly humans, half-orcs, and goblins. They make their living by extracting tolls from people traveling into and out of the dungeon—currently 1 GP/person to enter, with the exit toll depending on whether the travelers found any treasure. They can also be hired as guides and bodyguards for an additional fee. At any given time, about half of the Brine Vultures are in the caves, with the rest off hunting, fishing, or just getting drunk in town, where there’s booze other than algasina.
Until a couple months ago, most of the traffic through the cave was people going to the tomb complexes deeper on the first level (which I’ll cover next month). However, bodies there have started to rise as zombies and ghouls, making the tombs much more dangerous and sharply decreasing the traffic to the tombs. Thus, the Brine Vultures have had to start charging more to the smaller number of treasure-hunters going into and out of the tomb. When possible, they don’t kill people unwilling to pay the toll—just beat ‘em up and steal their stuff. This isn’t any kind of moral stand; killing is just more likely to attract serious attention from town and beyond.
What They Want
The undead are the Brine Vultures’ main problem right now. Not only have those shambling bastards seriously cut into their profits, but the stupid things keep wandering into the Vultures’ section of the caves and attacking people. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just killing all the undead (which would still be challenging for the pirates). There are hundreds of bodies interred in that part of the caves, and more will just keep rising unless the root cause is addressed. The Vultures have some (incorrect) theories—that its due to grave robbing, or because of the literally defaced statues in [AREA], but they lack the courage and manpower to
NPCS
Vulture-Eye Vertin (M Human, LE): A balding, heavyset man in his 60s, Vertin still looks (and sounds!) like a stereotypical pirate captain, right down to an eyepatch covering his left eye. He views the caves as a sort of retirement compared to the constant work of sailing. He has no ambitions of exploring more of the caves (and in fact forbids his crew from going to the lower levels). He’s somewhat reclusive, largely keeping to his room, but he’s generally well-liked by his crew because he provides good loot shares and more free time than they had as pirates.
In conversation, Vertin is friendly enough, but prefers to direct the conversation away from himself. He likes to use jokes, irony, and deflection to hide the fact that he avoids giving straight answers.
The source of Vertin’s nickname is hidden under his eyepatch: the vulture’s eye, a filmy blue magic item that replaced his original eye. It allows him to see how close creatures around him are to death, and to identify undead and constructs. He claims he earned it by giving a sea witch the best sex of her life.
Lur Flatnose (F Goblin, NE): Lur was promoted to First Mate (upon her predecessor’s death) two weeks before Vertin decided to give up shipboard life. She therefore feels like she never got a real chance to prove herself. With Vertin's increasing isolation, ordering the crew around mostly falls to Lur. Lately, Lur’s been thinking that she doesn’t need Vertin at all—she does all the work, so why shouldn’t she be the boss? Then they can use their foothold to delve into the dungeon rather than just picking up scraps. Only a few trusted crewmates know about her plans for mutiny.
Talking to Lur, you’d think that her vocabulary consists mostly of cusses. She doesn’t talk much, but she’s an incredibly inventive swearer. The Vultures have known her long enough not to take offense (her more colorful phrases often become mini-memes within the community), and she’s not concerned with being palatable to outsiders.
Cookie (M Orc, NE): Cookie is the Brine Vultures’ cook, and one of the longest-serving crew members—mostly because he never participated in battles if he could help it. For a pirate, he’s very combat-averse, and he prefers to strike unaware foes when possible. His only qualm about being on land is that staying in one place makes it harder to indulge his true passion, culinary experimentation. There’s only so many types of food common on a single island, after all.
Cookie is easier to talk to than either of his bosses, and he likes having people around to chat with while he cooks. The best ways to get on his good side is to either help with food prep or bring him an interesting carcass. He has no problems eating sentient creatures, but finds the meat of all humanoids except elves too boring to bother with.
