Goats Versus Owls

First a random thing pulled from my fundament during game-aftermath last session (guard-goats), and then some crazy half-owl things.

GUARD GOATS

This hand-raised guard-goat, known as "Strumpet", lived to the ripe old age of three before losing her life in a tragic green-slime-related accident.  At the time of her death, she was getting pretty good at picking simple locks.

Ernie Pyewackett has a farm south of Thistlemarch; there, he raises and trains animals.  Although he has a number of fine dogs which he sells for a competitive price ($25 for a guard dog), most folk are far more interested in his guard-goats.  These critters are, to all appearances, normal goats.  Ernie insists that they're smarter than dogs and he trains 'em just the same; many goats develop very distinct - some would say eccentric - personalities over time, especially if their human owner is himself a bit of a weirdo (such as a gunslinger, explorer, or semi-professional brigand).  Guard goats cost $30 each (stats as normal guard dog).

GUARD GOAT ALIGNMENT/PERSONALITY TABLE
1 - Lawful Clever
2 - Lawful Overprotective
3 - Neutral Stubborn
4 - Neutral Amorous
5 - Chaotic Daredevil
6 - Chaotic Destructive

GUARD GOAT APPEARANCE TABLE
1 - light grey, short-haired
2 - white and extremely fluffly long-haired
3 - black with a white blaze on its snout
4 - brown short-haired
5 - grey, long-haired coat done in dreadlocks all over
6 - black and white spotted or patches

7 - cream-colored, almost yellow

8  - inexplicably shaven; farmer will not discuss why

MORE OWL-THINGS

Although many realms have native owlbears, Wampus Country is very lucky in that it is home to a number of owl-derived species, owing perhaps to the genetic manipulation of an owl-based civilization in ancient times (it is supposed that the owls predate the apes in the march of history).  Here are a few.

Owl-dogs are devilishly difficult to train; they are willful, a bit cruel, and constantly hungry.

This owl-dog, called Mister Cranky, served as a wizard's familiar up until its master's grisly end in the City of Mazes.

"Fumble-face", a domesticated owl-dog trained for battle,  has consistently  missed every bite attack it has attempted.  His owner, a mercenary attached to Massey's Men, is considering barbecuing the damn thing.

Hairless owl-cat, stuffed, found in a lich's tomb.

An adult owl-bunny will eat thrice its weight in carrots and candy corn daily.

Owl-bunnies have become popular fashion accessories amongst the hoi-polloi in River-Town of late; although they fit nicely in a handbag, rumors that owl-bunnies can detect ghosts have not been borne out by experiment.

The only known living koaowla, Oogol the Crafty is a  skilled safe-cracker, second-story burglar,  and strangler, with a thousand-dollar bounty on his tiny head.

Mascot Monday: Sagacious Rex

Many are aware that owl-kin once dominated the lands of Wampus Country, and that few remain; tales of owlbears and owlynxes and the like are well known.  Fewer know that a small number of sentient, talking giant owls still live in the region, the last of their kind, the apex of owl-kin civilization.  These solitary beings live in the greenwoods and the pines, in the fields and in the snow - each the size of a dwarf or child, strikingly intelligent, and in many cases capable of spellcasting [1].

The acknowledged oldest and wisest of these owls is known to humans as Sagacious Rex - the wise "king" of the owls.  His primary habitat is some distance north of River-Town; he has built himself a very lovely tree-house over the years through a combination of his own magic and favors paid by skilled craftsmen.  Sagacious Rex, they say, knows almost anything anyone would care to ask; certainly, he has never hesitated to provide an answer to a question when interrogated.  His intelligence and knowledge are unmatched due to long years of experience, and some time ago he spent the better part of a year at a university in the Western Kingdoms proving his worth and earning multiple degrees very quickly.

Some citizens of Wampus Country seek out Sagacious Rex in order to ask him personal questions; "should I marry this man?", or "will my parents disown me if...".  Others seek hidden knowledge: "where can I find the Crimson Scarab of Doom" [2], or "who has hired these assassins to harry me?"  The wise old owl does not, however, dispense his answers gratis; he must be plied with gold or sweets, and the thoroughness of his response will be based entirely upon the quality of the offering; a rare cupcake, for example, interests the owl far more than a pile of plain coins.

Sagacious Rex is a four-foot-tall white horned owl who generally wears thick spectacles (due to his advanced age) and occasionally a mortarboard (a souvenir from this time at university).  He is Lawful in bent, but will answer anyone's questions provided their gift is suitable.

Sagacious Rex enjoys a pomegranate lollipop.

People who ask poorly-worded or open-ended questions may find themselves disappointed with an accurate, but ultimately unhelpful, response.

[1] - these owls are essentially hsiao from Tall Tales of the Wee Folk.  Go ahead and play one, they're cool.
[2] - the foolish young man who asked this question did indeed find the Crimson Scarab of Doom.  He's quite dead now.  Things that have "of Doom" in their name aren't meant to be found.

The Ongoing Saga, and Lessons Learned

One of my goals with Wampus Country was to run an ongoing campaign which might get some "West Marches"-style flair as time goes on - multiple coexisting groups, pickup games, drop-in drop-out, all of that good stuff.  We're not quite there, yet, but there's progress.  If I include the 'proto-Wampus' group from last year - and I suppose I do - we've had three "threads" occur on-camera in Wampus Country, and they're all pretty different.  Let's take a look at the different groups, the characters, and how it's gone down.

PROTO-WAMPUS GROUP


Last year, prior to jumping into the Hangout thing, I ran a Labyrinth Lord game via gchat (which had its own issues, as you can imagine).  Some of the elements (the town of Thistlemarch, a few NPCs, some monster concepts) first appeared here, so it's definitely Wampus-y, but I hadn't yet committed to the whole "screw it, let's go ahead an include firearms" thing at that point.  Still, I've been working on the assumptions that the actions of this crew did take place, probably six months or so before the opening of the G+ version of the campaign.  The player-created deities from this game have been folded into Wampus Country as well.

We had eight (!) players and characters, who were all first level:

Grom Baldursblade (dwarf) (this guy was seriously unlucky...all the time)
Roland (cleric of Gloriana) (priest of dubious morality #1)
Quincy the Arbitrary (cleric of Taronja the Eternal) (priest of dubious morality #2)
Thokul Gnome-kicker (fighter) (halberd! ostensibly in service to the halfling, yet trying to get him killed)
Grug (fighter) (essentially a barbarian type; Grug's tribe, the Black Eagles, became Wampus canon)
Sealor (thief) (pretty much fearless, and occasionally the only one talking sense)
Marworn (magic-user) (obsessed with collecting interesting spell components)
Oliver Duckworth III (halfling) (urbane, manicured dandy with a pony called 'Princess')

It was an interesting party, and running for them taught me a lot.  First and most important lesson - even first-level noobs can kick some butt, especially if there are EIGHT of them including two clerics!  Look at the fighting-power and potential staying-power in that mob.

I used B1 In Search of the Unknown with this run, and although we stopped the campaign before they completely cleared the place out, they came pretty close.  There were lizard-dudes beneath the halls and a couple of other things, but the memorable bits for me (besides licking the idol) were the animated female mannequin (which the players insisted on calling the 'tranny-quin') and the poggles.  Poggles are little kobold-guys who look like pugs, and they were all over the first level; the PCs grabbed one as a guide as well, an unnamed dogboy who'd had his intelligence amplified by some curious mushrooms.  The poggles are the origin of kobolds-as-breeds-of-dogs thing that's going on in Wampus Country nowadays.

Now since it's technically the same campaign and the PCs are all FLAILSNAILS compliant (not that it's difficult), I'm going to encourage any of these players who want to do the Hangout thang (in Wampus Country or otherwise) to do so.  I would love to see some cross-pollenation.

Hyperintelligent poggle befriended by the PCs (actual NPC illustration from game).  Being total bastards, the PCs never asked the poggle his name, which hurt him deeply.

HOUSEHOLD ADVENTURES: THE FROGPORT GROUP

When the Boy started playing with the maps and notes for my online group (see below), he wanted to play 'Adventure', too.  He rolled up a character and headed out into Snollygoster Swamp to try and capture a dinosaur.  Unfortunately he didn't grab one, but he did manage to run away from some presumably-goblins, then fight a swamp-ogre (and kick it in the crotch before again running away).  The whole adventure lasted about forty minutes, which is pretty good for his attention span.  We haven't run a second one yet, as I'm waiting for him to ask for it and don't want to force him into Daddy's hobbies; but he has been informed that there is a mission waiting for him (ghoulgoyles have stolen the World's Smallest Giraffe from the museum!) when he's in the mood.  There's also been some talk of Mrs. Wampus perhaps joining the Boy on an adventure one day.

Vallasen the Mighty (fighter) ("age seven, Strength seventeen").  Vallasen wears a chain shirt, red cape, and a newspaper hat, and is armed with cutlass and pistol.  He is accompanied by his trusty companion Wiggy-Bench, a sentient animated bench (and first-level cleric).  Wiggy-Bench has a more complicated backstory than many characters I've seen lately, and the Boy made it all up while we were waiting (on a bench) at the Jiffy Lube.  Kids are firehoses of imagination.

Vallasen the Mighty may not realize it yet, but the sinister Baron Van der Kluck has dark plans for Frogport...

EARLY, JONES & Co. - the ONLINE GROUP

Running Wampus Country via Hangout has been great - lots of fun, meeting new people, and some moments of memorable craziness.  We have a core group of 'native' characters who have been accompanied by various FLAILSNAILS guest stars in different sessions.

Horvendile Early (fighter) (gambler and pistoleer) - the voice of reason
Ornibus Jones (cleric of Sethet the snake god) - urine-obsessed holy-roller
James Ironwall (fighter) - James is actually a clone of an ACKS character from another online game; I'm looking forward to hearing in future about how the two Ironwalls have grown differently
Chauncey Woolstrike (magic-user) - university twit with a cricket bat

This crew has been joined from the FLAILSNAILSverse by the likes of Slin Zad (magic-user), The Colonel (mountebank), Thalia (cleric), Tsai Moff (sorceress), and...I know I'm forgetting someone.  Anyway, I never quite know who I'm getting in a given week, which can be exciting.

The adventurers in question have hunted pixies for bounty-money, conquered zombie beavers, and most recently poking around in some ancient crypts (hidden beneath the aforementioned zombie beavers).  Lots of humor going on in this game - Ornibus and his holy urine, Chauncey's twittery, and long-suffering Early and Ironwall playing straight man for the most part.  Double-entendre, bad puns, the whole deal.  Interestingly, although Wampus Country seems very silly on the blog - and is, indeed, fairly silly - the adventures this group have been on so far haven't been that intrinsically silly.  Okay, zombie beavers is weird, but not silly.  Not "lollipop-golem" silly, y'know?  We'll see what happens next.

Poor Ornibus Jones currently has the head of a platypus.

THE FUTURE?

The plan is of course to continue the weekly online group.  I'd love to get another one going somehow, perhaps an "occasional" online game in a different timeslot.  It's difficult for me to play/run before 10pm, though, which limits things - especially if I don't want to be up til 1 on a worknight.

I've also toyed with the idea of hitting one of my (several) Friendly Local Game Stores and see about getting maybe a biweekly f2f group going there.

The other iron in the fire GM-wise is stranger...  some friends at work have a weekly 3.5 game (which, funnily enough, plays on Fridays just like I do) and they've invited me to sit in and DM for a session.  That's being worked on, but I think it's safe to say that whatever I end up doing will be Wampus-related.  The original request was "run something classic", but most of the classics won't run comfortably in one night.  At this point - since they've also expressed that after all this charop combat blahblah in their current campaign they might be ready for a nice roleplay-heavy investigation thing - I'm thinking I'm going to yank them into the Wampus version of fairy-land for a night.

Wampus Country Summer Contest!

Even little blogs like this one can have fun contests!  The idea with this one is to get stuff from a bunch of people - adventure hooks, maps, NPCs, whatever - and put it all together into a pdf for everybody.

You know how when we were kids they'd make us write essays about "what we did on our summer vacation"?  This contest is all about that...except for someone else's summer vacation.

Read on for the details!

RUMPSCULLION'S SUMMER HOLIDAY


Wampus Country has had its share of popular story-papers, penny dreadfuls, and dime novels over the years, but by far the most famous was one of the first to achieve cultural saturation: Rumpscullion's Summer Holiday, a long-running serial adventure which was printed weekly in the River-Town Gazette for over two years.  The story of a dour gentleman and his wild niece careened wildly between frontier adventure, fantastic travelogue, gothic horror, and comedy of errors, due in part to its being written by committee (the 'author', J. Windham Glockenspiel, is widely assumed to be a pseudonym of the editors).  So well known was the serial that its eponymous protagonist has entered the Wampus Country lexicon - a 'rumpscullion' being a boring or mundane person who always ends up at the eye of the storm against his will.  The only constant characters in the saga are the following:

* Welliver Q. Rumpscullion, a fuddy-duddy of a bookkeeper who likes things to be 'proper' and 'squared away', yet always finds himself in some sort of trouble or danger.  He looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box, only more plump and cowardly; Rumpscullion carries a swan-headed walking stick and wears a wide-brimmed hat.  He is both a good-hearted gentleman and a blubbering trouble-magnet.

* Miss Lulubelle Harch, Rumpscullion's wayward and willful niece, sent to live with "Uncle Welly" for the summer, that she might learn some manners from the proper country gentleman.  However it seems that Lulubelle has a knack for getting her uncle into - and just as often out of - strange and dangerous situations.  Athletic, fetching, handy with both dagger and pistol, and fond of picking locks with her hairpins.

Other characters in the serial come and go - bounty hunters, miners, barbarian chieftains, strange people from the sky, beast-men from the caverns below, and the like.  The ongoing story of Rumpscullion and his niece contains danger, combat, exploration, wonder, mystery, and a good bit of running away from things.

Today's historians in Wampus Country are faced with the disappointment that Rumpscullion's Summer Holiday was never collected in a single edition, and many of the hundred-plus chapters may now be lost to us completely.  There is a reward for locating and submitting missing chapters!

Which brings us to our contest, of course.

HOW TO ENTER THE CONTEST

1) Go to this googledoc and select a chapter title, putting your name behind it in parentheses.  Note how vague these are.  If I get more interested parties than I have chapter titles, I'll add a mess more.

2) Write up a short summary (a paragraph or less will do) of what happens to Rumpscullion and Lulubelle in that chapter.  Don't worry about what order the chapters go in or what has come before.  There will always be missing chapters, so characters, locations, and items can appear out of nowhere.  Example: "Passing through the tiny faerie-door, Lulubelle and Rumpscullion find themselves inside a gigantic stained-glass egg, and must negotiate with its denizens - a pair of jackal-headed witches - in order to proceed.  Luckily Lulubelle thinks to bribe the witches with the star ruby she stole from the Clockwork Lion."  That's plenty.

3) Add to your summary paragraph something usable by a DM - an NPC, an item, a monster, a location writeup, a table, a spell, a map, an illustration, whatever floats your boat.  Play to your talents, or challenge yourself as you please.  The 'useful bit' should be related to your chapter summary, and the chapter summary should be related (somehow) to your chapter title.  You may include more than one useful bit per chapter if the spirit moves you.  If you include stats, please aim for old-school lingua franca.  I am fully aware that some overachiever will send me an entire dungeon or something, that's fine.

4) Send your stuff to me at erikisarobot AT gmail, with the understanding that anything you submit to the contest is thereby Creative Commons.  The deadline is August 1st - that's three weeks.  You may publish your entry elsewhere (on your blog, for example) if you wish.  You may enter more than once if you wish.

WHAT HAPPENS THEN?

First, the judging committee (that'd be me, Mrs. Wampus, and the Boy) will select a handful of entries as "winners" based on their utility, awesomeness, Wampus spirit, and suchlike.  And what do you win?  In ascending order...

EVERYBODY (even non-participants, fie on them) gets the finished pdf of stuff. I'll assemble all the entries in whatever order makes the best sense and release Rumpscullion's Summer Holiday into the wild - chock full of monsters, spells, NPCs, maps, adventure hooks, and whatever other goodies people throw in there. I'll be doing several chapters myself as well. If the spirit moves, I'll flesh out some of the 'chapters' into actual story-chapters.

Several HONORABLE MENTIONS will receive custom random tables of the multi-column d100 Wampus Country variety (see here and here for examples). You name it, I'll cogitate on it. Very specific requests and genres out of my experience will take a little longer, but are fair game (the brain is a muscle which must be exercised with creative challenges regularly).

Two EXALTED WINNERS will receive a Wampus Country care package - a box of gaming stuff, fiction, utter randomness, toys, food, and who-knows-what. As well as a custom random table or similar.

And one lucky SUPERIOR MONARCH OF SUMMERLAND will receive the random table, a Wampus Country care package, AND a wicked keen DM's Travel Kit (aka a sweet duct-tape messenger bag handcrafted by this dude I know, stuffed with a handmade dice-box thing from me, and more random swag).







Sound good?

GO!

Mascot Monday: The Curse of Al-Fulaq

The lengthy battles at Cadaver Canyon have shaped the lives of many in Wampus Country, directly or otherwise, and often for the worse. One such victim is the creature formerly known as Skadmanzell the Slayer, a wizard-hunter of some repute, who came to the Wampus Country to serve alongside the forces of Law and civilization in the war against the Great Desert Lich.


One of the Lich's sorcerous lieutenants - plied by the secrets of lichdom no doubt - was the dark wizard Al-Fulaq, a reaver and torturer capable of inflicting great magical pain upon his foes. During the conflict, Skadmanzell earned a reputation as a callous commander, suggesting that the wounded and dead could easily be replaced with cash. On the third day of the second battle of Cadaver Canyon (also known as the Font of Blood), Skadmanzell the Slayer waded through scores of undead warriors to strike at his target Al-Fulaq, and the battle between the two was joined on a rocky promontory. Skadmanzell's blade [1] took Al-Fulaq's life - but not before the wizard uttered his death-curse.


The wizard-hunter was transformed into a simple white duck, his memories scrambled. In the aftermath of the battle, Skadmanzell was lucky not to be cooked and eaten. In the years to follow, the strangely long-lived duck has wandered about Wampus Country, seeking a cure to its curse, to no avail. Recently Skadmanzell has hear rumors that Al-Fulaq lives on in some sort of undead form [2], and the duck hopes to make himself a familar to an up-and-coming wizard in order to steer destiny and find Al-Fulaq.


THE WHITE DUCK

AC 9, HD 1, hp 3. He's a duck. Saves as F5, though, so that's something.


Unfathomable - The duck's mind cannot be read by any means, magical or psionic. Nor can the duck speak (even with magical aid), other than to accusingly quack the name of the dread sorceror who cursed him. Skadmanzell has only fleeting memories of his former life, including his origins, family, and one-time musical talent (although if presented with a toy piano it can peck out the melody to 'Little Wing' pretty well).

Sympathetic Compensation - As some strange side-effect of the curse, when friendly characters within 10 feet of the white duck are injured, the waterfowl coughs up copper pieces equal to the hit points lost. If bonded as a familiar, the white duck will compensate regardless of the distance between the wizard and itself.




[1] Skadmanzell's blade is now lost somewhere in Wampus Country; it is a shortsword +2, +3 versus spellcasters.

[2] Al-Fulaq is now an Eye of Fear and Flame with additional wizardy powers. He was last seen disappearing into the City of Mazes beneath Big Eagle Mountain.

Breakdown: Let's Go To The Zoo: Part Two

In the occasional 'Breakdown' feature, we take an unusual picture and try to wring some appropriately Wampus-y content out of it.  This time we revisit the Marvelous Menagerie outside River-Town, a private zoo packed full of all manner of strange beasties.  Our previous visit is here.


One of the most beloved habitats in the Marvelous Menagerie is an assemblage of double-ended creatures.  Not to be confused with "two-headed" creatures, which have two heads at the front of their body, the double-enders each have a head for a head, and a head at the rump.  The Marvelous Menagerie is rightly proud of managing the largest (well, only) collection of double-ended creatures in the world, and does a brisk business in commemorative buttons featuring bawdy sayings related to the exhibit.

Double-enders, starting on the left-hand side, then around sort-of clockwise:


The Goatbuzzard has an immense vulture-like head with rapacious beak and teeth at the fore, and a horned goat or llama-like head at the rear, mounted on a powerful clublike necktail.  Small, roaming packs of goatbuzzards are not unknown in the pinewoods of the north; they are omnivorous scavengers, favoring a diet of both carrion and fruit.  Goatbuzzards will fight to defend themselves or drive off a larger creature, but are not particularly dangerous.


Far more threatening to travelers is the perpetually grumpy and quite territorial Mandrill Angler (sometimes abbreviated to Mangler), a flat-faced baboon-like ape which so loved fish its tail evolved into a pelican head.  Manglers are ace climbers, and several large troupes of them prowl the mangrove trees along the river.  They will descend upon travelers en masse, pelting them with fruit and stones before closing the distance to engage in melee using their powerful fists and razor-sharp ass-beaks.


The Terrapin-tailed Land Narwhal is a placid beast living in small family groups.  A remarkably efficient forager, it uses its one long neck to graze from lower branches of trees as it rears up on its haunches; simultaneously, the turtle-like head at the rear is in the perfect position to dig for grubs or truffles.  Like all land narwhals, the horn on its snout is made of harvestable brass, which has led to some depopulation in the wild; few hunters would pass up the chance to take a shot at a terrapin-tailed which has lumbered into range.


In the foreground, we witness the horror of the Gobbleswallow, the largest amphibious double-ender known to man, the size of a large grizzly. Most tales of this creature focus on the immense, gulping fish-head capable of swallowing a child or goat whole - and the sharpness of its teeth.  But in truth, further research suggests that it is the second head - that of a narcoleptic tapir - which must truly be feared.  On those rare occasions when the tapir-head wakes (usually provoked by starvation or the presence of a great deal of adrenalin, as when fighting to defend a clutch of eggs), devastation follows... for that tusked creature possesses a malevolent intelligence and the ability to hum a hypnotic ditty which dominates the minds of men, causing them to slaughter one another.  The tapir head then yawns and returns to napping, allowing the giant fish head to clean up the mess.


The Cackling Badonkadonk, bottom left, is a most curious creature.  Its primary head is small, with shovel-like tusks and an underbite, affixed to a serpentine neck; this head feeds by weaving its way into rabbit-warrens and vole-holes, producing a laughter-like call as it flushes out prey.  But far more interesting is the rear head of this double-ender, which prefers to eat metal - coins, weapons, armor, old tin cans, ploughs, what have you.  Within its saliva and digestive juices is a strong oxidizing agent which slowly rusts and dissolves the metal consumed; some say the beast is related to other, rarer beasts with even more powerful rusting ability.  The metal, wood, stone, and whatever else the secondary head consumes are held in a gizzard-like organ located near the rear of the beast; slicing the animal open postmortem will certainly reveal all of that junk.

Amusing Dungeons: Part One

Sometimes when you're creating a dungeon, getting started is the hardest part.  If you need a 'seed' to get you rolling, try using an amusement-park map.  Any amusement-park map is going to have some shapes and pathways you can riff off of to create your dungeon map, as well as ride and attraction names which might inspire your monsters, traps, and treasures.  Having just returned from vacation in Hersheypark, PA, I'm going to use their map as inspiration to give this a shot (you may wish to open it in another tab and poke around).  Hersheypark was a good choice for me as a dungeon-inspiration map, as the chocolate theme suggests I drop this dungeon somewhere near the Candyland bit of Wampus Country...that's presuming, of course, that there's a chocolate thing going on by the time we're done mangling the map.

Let's look at the map as a whole, first.  Most amusement parks are broken up into areas or zones, each with a different theme.  Those are your dungeon sections and associated themes.  If you pull up the Hersheypark map in another window (it's pretty keen) you'll see that Hersheypark has the following zones:

1) Tudor Square - shopping village outside the main gate.  This is easily going to be the medieval village next to the dungeon entrance.
2) Founder's Circle - the hub.  Maybe this area is the zone once (or currently) controlled by the standard "mad" wizard, etc.
3) Music Box Way.  I want to throw some musical traps in this zone along with the ride-based monsters.
4) The Hollow.  Great name...could be anything.
5) Minetown.  It's a mine!  The dungeon writes itself!
6) Pioneer Frontier.  Perhaps rather than being a wild-west frontier, this is the dungeon's frontier with the Underdark or something.  Or a more-vanilla 'pioneer town' that sunk beneath the earth as part of a curse...cowboys versus drow, anyone?
7) The Boardwalk.  Mandatory underwater level?  Town on the shores of a subterranean lake?
8) Midway.  Could have game-related traps and tricks?  Or go metaphorical and be the portal between this reality and another?

Now obviously I'm not going to tackle a huge dungeon in a single blogpost, but this entry is meant to introduce the idea of using the theme-park map as inspiration.  At this point I'm not even worried about mapping - maybe sketch out the zones as boxes with some pathways connecting them; later we can write "secret tunnel" or "underground river" or whatever on some of those connections.  And we can tweak the relative sizes of the zones as well, as we go.

Take a look at the names of some of the major rides.  These could represent monster locations, a series of traps, or some kind of treasure, settlement, or rumor.  If you're the gonzo sort, some of these can be ported over without much change.  Starship America becomes a ghostly astronaut trapped in the dungeon in the wreckage of his ancient spacecraft, for example; Dinosaur-Go-Round (a kiddie ride) prompts some sort of prehistoric monster in that area.  Frankly, I like the idea of a creepy carousel in the middle of the wizard zone - especially if the beasts on the merry-go-round are alive, and "pinned" in place with metal poles like huge butterflies.  Imagine a carousel with an owlbear, some wolves, a peryton, a rust monster...  I'm imagining the Howler as a two-headed werewolf for some reason.  What's the Flying Falcon?  Freaking terrifying, that's what it is.  There's nothing more manly than holding onto a seven-year-old for dear life and muttering it's okay it's okay it's okay for the duration of a ride.  I'm...not into heights.

Larger rides, like roller coasters, might be bigger monsters or larger settlements.  That Fahrenheit coaster?  A clutch of fiery salamanders.  The Great Bear in Minetown?  Maybe a huge earth-elemental bear with diamond claws and flecks of gold and platinum in his stoney fur (now that's a pelt worth selling).  And you might go so far as to allow the form of a ride to shape what you do with it; how about a thrilling log-flume chase over some subterranean waterfalls as the PCs are pursued by their foes?

The point is that the theme-park map is chock-full of seemingly random crap that lends itself to a dungeonlike structure and can inspire monster placement and backstory.  I'm going to keep chugging along on converting Hersheypark into a dungeon, with periodic updates here.  In the meantime, throw "amusement park map" or "theme park map" into a Google image search and look at all the free inspiration lying around.