The Gravebind Unraveling
A one-shot adventure for 4–5 Level 3 players of the world’s most famous roleplaying game
After some early (and very appreciated) feedback, I’ve made some changes.
Latest version (28APR25) is 1.14. Please keep the suggestions coming!
A couple of weeks ago,
shared a method for dungeon map generation called Dungeon Shuffle. Subscribers were invited to participate in a “dungeon jam” to showcase their results.The jam has only three participation rules:
✅ I must use the Dungeon Shuffle tool
❌ My dungeon should fit on one page
✅ I must make it freely available
Two outta three ain’t bad. Brevity is not my forte.
Regardless, I got it done, and I’m proud of my first publicly shared adventure.
Grab The Gravebind Unraveling here:
The gist of the Dungeon Shuffle is to use playing cards and dice to rough out a basic dungeon structure based on the Johnn Four’s 5-Room Dungeon framework. Once the rooms are physically laid out and the room types are assigned, it’s a “simple” matter of adding the details.
The dice told me my theme was undead, that my dungeon would have 13 rooms, and the number of doors each room would have. The playing cards told me what category each room would be and the room’s size. As I drew each card, I sketched the room on graph paper.
I had to make a couple of minor adjustments:
First, I wanted an alternative entrance/exit… so I added one. That gave me fourteen rooms instead of thirteen.
Second, the Dungeon Shuffle calls for the number shown on the playing card to represent the number of standard 5-foot squares. That was just too small for me. I can’t imagine an adventuring party achieving anything in a 2-square room. So for The Gravebind Unraveling, I doubled whatever number of squares the cards gave me.
Here is the initial sketch:
Then I went to Dungeon Scrawl, a free online dungeon mapper, and created a prettier version for the game master:
Then the writing started. That was the easy part.
But then 30 (yes, 30) pages later, the revision started. Like I said, brevity is not my forte. So I cut. And cut. And cut. On the positive side, I cut it to 9 pages… but the adventure lost its *pop!* in the process. So I slowly added bits back. The final version ended up at a svelte 11 pages of text.
As a final step, I used the styles from an MS Word D&D supplement template by Laura Hirsbrunner I picked up from Dungeon Master’s Guild.
Try It Out!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on my first shared adventure,
The Gravebind Unraveling.