I recently ran a couple of one-shot adventures for Dungeons & Drafts using the Axeholm side quest from Dragon of Icespire Peak. Since each session was confined to three hours, I found it necessary to pick and choose which of the 30 keyed areas of Axeholm’s map I’d keep in my game.

In the end, I decided to make the rooms at the center of the lower level map available for exploration (adding the adjacent West Hall and Smithy to available areas) along with the second level hall bedchambers, bath, and privy. I jettisoned the rest of the areas on the map, making it more of a gauntlet than a dungeon delve.

This trimmed the number of keyed locations down from 30 to 13, which I felt confident I could get through in the allotted time for each event, while keeping the tavern and travel encounters I had built into this one-shot as well.

Since there were references to earthquake damage in a couple of Axeholm’s halls, I decided to make the damage more extensive throughout the entire complex, providing a plausible explanation for the disappearance of 17 keyed areas from the map. That way, if there were players at my table who had played through or run Axeholm for a group previously, this tweak changed the map as they knew it. This was just one of many tweaks I made to Axeholm without changing it into something unrecognizable from the original (something I have strong feelings about). Perhaps I’ll share more of those tweaks in the coming days if I can find time to sit down and write.

Anyway, using past earthquake activity to modify the map of Axeholm got me thinking: do other locations in the Sword Mountains have earthquake damage?

As a matter of fact, they do! Both Icespire Hold and the Dwarven Excavation site also have earthquake damage. Wave Echo Cave, too; although the damage is described as a result of “the earthquakes that rocked Wave Echo Cave during the final spell battle of the orc invasion.”

For Wave Echo Cave, the last bit is such a minor point that, if you wanted to make tectonic activity a part of what it is to live in the shadow of the Sword Mountains, you could easily hand waive it and say damage at WEC is the result of earthquakes over the last five centuries as well (which provides Dungeon Masters with a narrative vehicle to pare down keyed areas to make Wave Echo Cave a one-shot as well).

How else could you use earthquakes in your game, other than to collapse inconvenient key areas to fit your adventure into a one-shot? A few ideas:

• Make tremors and aftershocks a part of random encounter table. It could be as simple as a non-combat encounter with the land that adds a layer to your world building, or it could trigger an avalanche. The threat of calamity or, you know, an actual calamity.
• Want to move the story along in any of these adventure locations in the Sword Mountains? Trigger an earthquake with several aftershocks that degrade the structural integrity of the dungeon, making the last part of the adventure about escaping the threat of an imminent collapse.
• Bake it into everyday life in Phandalin. The characters are in the common room of the Stonehill Inn when suddenly the doors swing open, the windows rattle, dust drops down from the rafters, the contents of their tankards slop over, and the table they sit at moves about a foot from where it was a moment ago. Just outside the inn, the dogs bark, donkeys bray, and horses whicker. As for the locals? They barely notice. If someone asks about the aftershock, residents just shrug. “Does that sometimes.”

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