Designing The Crypts of Ember Hollow

Building the LorePanic demo, we hit a wall: the SRD alone wasn't enough to show what the tool could do. So we wrote a full D&D 5e one-shot from scratch, The Crypts of Ember Hollow, and released it free under CC-BY-4.0. This is what we chose, what we cut, and why.

Why write an original adventure?

We could have used existing open content for the demo. The SRD is right there. But a search tool is only as good as the content you search through, and we wanted something that would make people think "oh, this is what it would feel like with my own adventure books."

That meant a real adventure. NPCs with secrets, puzzles that talk to each other across rooms, encounters that pay off earlier clues. Not a stat-block compendium. Not twenty identical rooms. Something a GM would actually prep on a Thursday and run on Saturday.

It also had to be fully original so we could release it under a Creative Commons license without any legal headaches. No third-party IP, no borrowed proper nouns. Just the SRD 5.1 rules and our own world.

The design constraints

We set a few rules for ourselves before writing a single word:

• One session. The adventure had to be completable in a single 3-4 hour session. That meant a tight scope: one town, one dungeon, one villain.
• Levels 1-3. New players should be able to play it, and experienced GMs should be able to slot it into any low-level campaign.
• SRD-only monsters. Every stat block had to come from the Systems Reference Document so we could publish under CC-BY-4.0. No Monster Manual exclusives.
• Dense enough to search. The adventure needed enough interconnected details that searching it with LorePanic would feel genuinely useful: NPCs who reference each other, clues that pay off rooms later, treasure that ties into lore.
• Emotionally resonant. A dungeon crawl is fun, but what makes an adventure memorable is caring about the outcome. We needed stakes that felt real.

Building Ember Hollow

The town came first. We wanted a place that felt lived-in: small enough that every NPC matters, detailed enough that players could spend an hour asking questions and piecing things together before ever entering the dungeon.

Five named NPCs, each holding a piece of the puzzle and none holding all of it. Torvin the tavern keeper knows the town's rhythms. Elder Maren has the history and the quest hook. Silas the merchant knows more than he should. Lira is the traumatized survivor whose guilt is the emotional weight of the whole thing. Brother Alden, the priest, has the spiritual read on the threat.

Players have to actually cross-reference the conversations to figure out what they're walking into. That structure is what makes a search tool earn its keep: queries like "What does Silas know about the Ember Heart?" or "Who saw the figure at the tree line?" return real answers instead of one-line summaries.

The dungeon: ten rooms, zero filler

The Crypts have ten keyed locations across two levels. The upper crypt (C1-C3) is the public burial chamber: familiar enough that players relax, unsettling enough that they shouldn't. The lower chambers (C4-C10) are Aldric Voss's sealed laboratory, where things get strange.

Every room serves at least two purposes:

• C1 (Sunken Vestibule). Sets the tone, and quietly establishes that the barricade was broken from inside, not outside.
• C5 (Web-Choked Storeroom). A combat plus the discovery of Pella Marsh's body. Answers one question, raises another: why did she come down alone?
• C6 (Puzzle of the Three Flames). A logic puzzle that gates progress and rewards players who actually examine the environment instead of rolling dice at it.
• C7 (Hall of Copper Mirrors). The Donal Fenn rescue, plus a mechanical hint about the copper panels revealing invisible creatures. That hint pays off in C8.
• C8 (Shadow Vault). A dangerous fight, plus a hidden shortcut to the final room for parties who explore thoroughly.
• C9 (Bone Workshop). The Ged Ashwood rescue, plus a way to weaken the boss by disrupting the bone conduits.

The goal was to make sure that a GM searching "what happens in room C7?" gets a rich answer with multiple threads, not just "four skeletons attack."

Aldric Voss: a villain worth talking to

The final encounter with Aldric is the part we're proudest of. Mechanically he's just a wight. The reason the fight matters is that his story matters.

Aldric was a man who loved his town. He cured plagues, warded off raids, spent decades keeping Ember Hollow alive. His tragedy is that he feared death more than he feared what the Ember Heart would turn him into. Three centuries of isolation hollowed him out until the protector was the threat.

The DC 18 Persuasion check we wrote into the fight isn't a way out of it. It's a way to make him hesitate for a round, the fragments of who he was breaking through. It doesn't save him. But it earns the moment when the Ember Heart shatters and his expression shifts to relief.

That's the kind of detail that shows up when a GM asks the AI agent "What is Aldric's motivation?" and gets back a nuanced answer instead of "he's undead and evil."

The three missing villagers

We structured the three missing NPCs as an escalating emotional arc through the dungeon:

• Pella Marsh (found dead in C5). The early gut-punch. She came back alone to gather herbs for Lira; the note in her pocket says so.
• Donal Fenn (found injured in C7). The mid-dungeon win. The party saves someone, morale lifts.
• Ged Ashwood (found captive in C9). Right before the boss, with a clock attached. He's being drained.

These aren't random hostages. The party met Lira in town, heard her guilt about suggesting the visit. They met Gareth Fenn, barely holding himself together. So when the party finds these people, alive or dead, it lands because the town section earned it.

Why CC-BY-4.0?

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, because the TTRPG community needs more open content, not less. Use it, modify it, translate it, publish your own remix. Just credit the source.

It also makes the demo actually useful. You're not poking at placeholder text; you're searching a real adventure that you can download and run at your table tonight. If it leaves you wondering what LorePanic could do with your books, even better.

Try it yourself

The full adventure is live in the LorePanic demo right now. Search it, chat with the AI about it, ask whatever you want about NPCs or rooms. No account needed.

If you run The Crypts of Ember Hollow at your table, drop us a note. We want to hear how it went.