You see a 15 foot square room. It has two regular chairs, two rocking chairs, and a comfortable-looking sofa. A rug lies diagonally on the wood floor, and in the center of the rug is a chest.
You may recall my post back in March 2013 about the passing of my good friend Alan. Tonight his widow came by and brought me his footlocker. It was locked, and nobody knew where the key was. She asked me to return the empty box and any private papers I might find, and told me to keep whatever else I found.
I tried to pick it, but apparently I’m a wizard rather than a thief. And no, I don’t know Knock. So I got out my drill and started in on the keyhole.
It spun about three times and unlocked. Go figure.
As you can see, I had my familiar helping me.
I unpacked the materials carefully.
Two complete sets of Basic Marvel Super Heroes, one original and one of the updated version (which I didn’t know existed). Some random D&D materials, from AD&D 1E and BX up to 3E. Some Forgotten Realms materials, including a box from the 1E version with just the transparent map films inside along with random unrelated materials. A complete set of Star Frontiers (the original, from before they rebranded it “Alpha Dawn.” A bunch of comics, mostly Warlord and Conan.
More importantly, to me, I found papers he wrote himself. Mostly his character sheets, from games I’ve run over the years. I remembered them all.
But the thing I was looking for wasn’t in his footlocker at all… it was in a binder she handed me almost as an afterthought. The dungeon he was designing. It was handwritten, a one-level dungeon map (around 40 rooms or so) and a four page key to the dungeon.
I’ll be publishing it. Since it’s short, it will probably show up in AA2.
Now I have a hankering to play me some Star Frontiers…