Devil’s Train: a dungeon inside a dream
A Knave 2e adventure of dreams, contracts, and an antagonist who reacts when the party strays, with isometric cartography and editorial design in InDesign.
I wrote Devil’s Train for the 2024 Knave 2e Adventure Game Jam. It is an adventure for three to five characters of level 5 or higher, trapped in a dream realm ruled by Morpheus. Alongside the writing, I handled cartography, editing, and layout in Adobe InDesign. The print-friendly version runs to 16 pages.1
A host with a route already planned
Morpheus makes a tempting promise: follow his directions to an enormous treasure. The route seems simple, but the offer involves a contract and the control he exercises over this place. Leaving that route is central to the adventure.
The module separates three Devil’s Path locations from eight exploration rooms. The game master can add rooms and connect them, extending the dungeon. This creates two scales: a route the devil tries to impose, and a network of places where the party can investigate other possibilities.
The devil’s reaction as a game procedure
Morpheus has stages of anger. When the adventurers stray, his attitude and the conditions along the path change. The Devil’s Path pages organize these changes by stage, letting the game master look up how the same situation develops.
The antagonist’s insistence becomes something the party can observe during play. The train participates in this escalation, appearing along the route and changing as events progress. The adventure’s title connects to a structure that reacts to the characters’ disobedience.
Three entry hooks also provide different starting points: seeking a legendary place, dealing with the consequences of a questionable bargain, and undertaking a quest involving a sword. They allow the same scenario to fit different campaigns.
Rooms with their own situations
The encounters include a solitary werewolf, an underwater laboratory, a fungal infestation, and a rodents’ opera. Each location offers characters, objects, and conditions to investigate and experiment with. Combat sits alongside information to uncover, creatures to interact with, and connections between rooms.
Some objects and clues matter elsewhere in the dungeon. Information travels between locations, encouraging the party to remember earlier discoveries and reinterpret situations. The solutions and secrets behind those relationships remain in the module, to be discovered during play.
Cartography and page composition
Room pages place isometric maps alongside reference text. Numbers identify the locations, connections point to other rooms, and stat blocks accompany relevant creatures. Bullets and indentation separate immediately visible details from further information.
The publication alternates illustrated introductory pages with room pages on light backgrounds. Headers distinguish the Devil’s Path from the Dungeon Rooms. This visual organization helps the game master locate both the current environment and the kind of information needed.
Authorship and collaboration
I handled the adventure’s writing, cartography, editing, and design, with layout in InDesign. Leena Cruz contributed cover art, proofreading, and design.
Find the adventure and files on itch.io (opens in a new tab).
Footnotes
-
Devil Dream (Print-friendly), 16 pages. This article presents the adventure’s structure and editorial work; full details are in the module available on the Devil’s Train page (opens in a new tab). ↩