Mastering Dungeons

For today's D&D session I built a dungeon :D My first one, I'm so excited (and we barely encountered any dungeons in our previous campaign either.) It has puzzles and monsters and NPCs for them to encounter and secret doors and of course a treasure room, and even a twist at the end that ties into the bigger plot if they can find it. DD was a huge help with brainstorming. I had to re-skin the monsters and decide on the loot and try to make the puzzles appropriately challenging; since it's the tomb of a dwarf king a lot of the difficulty will depend on whether anyone of the party speaks dwarven, which I don't know, so that'll be interesting.

I got the idea to build a dungeon because at the end of last session my party wanted a combat encounter and they were wandering around in the woods, so I used a random encounter generator and they fought three Gelatinous Cubes. Which was a ton of fun, but later I realized that three Gelatinous Cubes in a forest is very unusual so I tried to figure out how they got there (answer: they were chased out of the cave by the person who broke into the tomb before my party, and who disabled the security system to the degree that my party can find the entrance even though for the past thousand years nobody could, which they hopefully won't find out until late.) Also I was a bit stuck with the larger plot and I figured a dungeon is a nice distraction, and it will also give the party a reputation which can then be the reason why people approach them.

It looks like all players will be here tonight, which is good because all the monsters are probably right at the edge of too powerful for them – but if they're smart enough they don't have to fight any of them so I figure that balances out. I'm so curious how they'll do :D