Downloadable Dungeon: The Waterclock Crypts
A level 15 dungeon my players called the toughest and their favorite, plus a few design choices behind the devious traps.
Welcome back and hope you had a lovely weekend! Last week’s article walked through my process of creating an atmospheric dungeon.
This week, I’m sharing the dungeon itself: the Waterclock Crypts. My players named it as their favorite, and I’m proud of how it came together at the table. I hope you get the chance to run it at yours. It’s a level 15 dungeon balanced for
The PDF is relatively unformatted but contains everything you need to run the dungeon for one of your sessions. I’ve included statblock modifications where appropriate. Later, I’d like to format it and include the maps I used and make it look more official.
This dungeon is designed for 6 level 15 players.
Background and Story
The Waterclock Crypts sit beneath the Neverdeath Graveyard in Neverwinter. They were once the burial site and hidden research facility of the Waterclock Guild, a canon Forgotten Realms organization of artificers, geomancers, and artisans who built beautiful, incredibly accurate waterclocks powered by water flow and bound elemental magic. Founded in the 13th century DR by the elf wizard Lucan Greenharrow and the clockmaker Saborn Rendel, the Guild collapsed sometime after the Spellplague (1385 DR), and the city above has largely forgotten it exists.
The dungeon ties to one of my players’ backstories. The antagonist is Kazzan, a former Waterclock Guild apprentice turned mad wizard, borrowed from the Neverwinter MMORPG and reflavored to fit my campaign. With the help of a Far Realm Shard, Kazzan channels his magic through the artifact to contact the Elder Evil Hadar, the Dark Hungerer. Much of the crypt has been converted into his laboratories and experiment chambers, layered on top of the Guild’s original defenses. The dungeon culminates in a portal reaching out to Hadar (a cinder-red star in some distant corner of the void), an avatar of the Elder Evil called the One of Many, and a host of star spawn drawn through from the Far Realm.
Building the Dungeon
When I was building out the dungeon, I kept coming back to two questions I lean on whenever I’m prepping situations instead of plots: what does this faction want, and how do they get it?
The Guild wanted to build the most precise waterclocks in Faerûn, and they got there by binding elemental magic to flowing water. Everything in the Crypts (the pipes, the pump room, the elemental statues, the boiler) falls out of those two answers. Once I could answer these questions, I had a better idea of the rooms the dungeon could contain.
Kazzan came from the same questions, just pointed at a different goal. He wants to call Hadar into the world and end it before someone else does. He gets there by hijacking the Guild’s old infrastructure and channeling power through a Far Realm Shard. So the dungeon is two architects with their own agendas in one space. The Guild’s clockwork on the bones, Kazzan’s experiments grafted on top, soft pulsing flesh creeping over old copper pipes.
Kazzan himself is a reskinned villain from the Neverwinter MMORPG. For his personality, I leaned on my academic background to flesh out an antagonist who greets you politely and walks you through his thesis before trying to kill you. I enjoy finding a villain I can perform with confidence and steal the wrapping where I need to.
Link to the PDF
Here you go and I hope you enjoy! Have comments or feedback? Please comment below!
Design Choices I’m Proud Of
I’m very proud of the dungeon as a whole but there were some areas I had a lot of fun building.
Pump Room
The Pump Room is a nest of puzzles and traps. I’ve been collecting puzzle ideas from so many sources and the Pump Room is where I wanted to put some. What I cared about was making sure every single one of them was something the Waterclock Guild would have actually built. So that included water under pressure, heat exchanges (a dungeon has to be warm for people to live there!), clockwork gears, and elemental binding.
A puzzle that exists because of who built it is a piece of worldbuilding the players solve with their hands.
The Silent Corridor with Invisible Blades
W8 is sixty feet of corridor with a permanent silence effect on it and six sets of invisible arcane blades sweeping through chest-height at irregular intervals. For some reason, I never thought about combining traps together to create a more devious effect. And silence + invisibility really cancels so many tools the players rely on. I also homebrewed that the players didn’t ‘feel’ the damage until a few seconds after receiving it (so they would travel further into the hallway!).
Boss Battle
Kazzan runs on the Larva Mage statblock with a homebrew signature spell, and two Legendary Resistances. The One of Many uses the Elder Brain with a fly speed. On Initiative Count 20, two parallel tracks of lair actions kick off at once, one from the Elder Brain and one from Hadar itself. Ten enhanced star spawn grues, a hulk, and a seer fill out the rest of the room.
Combining lair actions from multiple monsters, having AOE spells and effects every round, and stacking minions and terrain in between, made the Kazzan fight memorable and kept the players on their toes. When I unleashed the homebrew spell, tried to pull a player through the portal, or fired off the devious lair action that made them shed powerful class abilities and spell slots, it was a fun way to really up the challenge without solely relying on damage.