Nenilmare: Dungeon 26, Week 1

09 Jan, 2026

Introduction

I've mentioned in several places across the OSR-verse that I would be taking part in my own personal Dungeon26 challenge. I thought it would be fun to do a post about the first week of progress, as well as talking a little about the dungeon and my process for preparing for my third attempt at the challenge.

Back in 2023 I heard about Dungeon23 sometime around May and there was no way I could catch up, so I decided to wait until next year. Of course it wasn't as fun since everyone had moved on to various other projects and nothing was as big as Dungeon23 for various reasons. But I started off with no real plan and mostly enjoyed it. I was using the DungeonScrawl webapp, which has many benefits when doing a normally sized dungeon but presented me with some issues as the dungeon grew larger. By that time I was feeling that my dungeon was a bit aimless; I had always known I would have to revise it heavily before it was something as intricate as I would like but this first attempt wasn't going anywhere I liked. I restarted, drew the rooms to a new dungeon in an afternoon. This time it was fungus based, using a lot of moulds and Myconids and similar types of enemies. Around the end of April I was running out of steam. This theme was too limited, as opposed to my much too broad theme from before. I had another weekend afternoon set aside and restarted again with the theme of "necromancer's tower" heavily inspired by the black castle at the start of Shadows Linger by Glen Cook. There was an atrium in the middle that went all the way to the top, which was a neat idea but also a pain as I had to design around it each level beyond the first and it took up a lot of space. Once again, I lost steam. I bit off a little more than I could chew in May or June and tried to make a level that was like the teleporter puzzle room from the mid-late portion of Half-Life -- no corridors, all portals. Then, I got into school and after two months or more of not working on it I abandoned the dungeon once more.

All this to say that I realized that if I was ever going to do this challenge again I would need to have a better plan and a more comprehensive approach from the outset.

Methods

This time around I was inspired, as many people are, by seeing a particularly attractive notebook in the bookstore; a Hobonichi a5 graph notebook. This one was a bit pricier than I usually go for, and as I kept making trips to the bookstore it kept calling my name. Then, the post-Christmas clearance sale hit. It finally seemed worth it, so I pulled the trigger and started to think of the possibilities. The benefits of using a physical notebook are that I can take it with me, and just open it up. No saving. No power needed.¹

Initially I was going to revisit the really eclectic approach from my first attempt back in '24. I wrote down some basic principles -- in addition to the level-per-month I would have "zones" which were different in theme. This way, I wouldn't get bored. I also wanted each level to traverse more than one zone so that each level had at least two themes because I think having dungeon denizens in conflict is a neat idea that I've never really pulled off. I also wanted to incorporate some metroidvania elements of the dungeon being sealed off because it wasn't traversable entirely through normal means² I also decided that I wanted there to be explicit bosses in the dungeon that unlocked further levels, but also all needed to be killed to access the final level entirely.

I was all set to begin when I stumbled upon this post from one of my favorite blogs out there and something about it really stuck out to me. The fact that it seems like an undead or construct, but isn't, was intriguing. It seemed like something that would be at home in a Sileadh dungeon, and I thought about how I wanted this dungeon to tell a compelling story through its environment. So, I settled on a concept and worked up a wandering monster table based on that.

But I'll get to that in a minute. First, I need to talk about how I'm going to be making this dungeon. I am no stranger to random dungeon generation. I have used plenty of online random generators before as a starting point, and even randomly generated a dungeon by hand following WWN's tables as well as the wonderful AD&D-based tables for OSE designed by Eteneme. I realized that in order to make using my dungeon notebook as seamless as possible I was going to have to put those tables in it, so I did, and as I copied them down I made some adjustments and added a 2d6 oracle as well as a d20 table of room types. I was ready. Then we partied because that was New Year's Eve!

The Tragedy of Nenilmare

It would be easy to assume that the War of Deliverance was fought between the humans and the Sileadh. But the truth was that the Sileadh were divided at that time into many petty kingdoms and city-states. One such city-state was Nenilmare, which in the elven tongue is "The Waters of Moonlight." The city's king was of no real importance among his kin and peers. Sequestered in a backwater, far from the capitol, the city had long been neglected and itself had no slaves to speak of. When the armies of the Empress-Priest Alina descended into the valley to besiege it, the king himself rode out to meet her. While the city was not rich in money or warriors, it did have something not found anywhere else -- a special font of magic that could crystalize moonlight caught in pure water and create Elenon, batteries of magical energy, much faster than the usual methods. The king agreed to lend the use of this font to the priestess' war wizards, and to swear fealty to her, if she would spare his city. And thus, a pact was made; the priestess would extend other offers like this to other less-than-prominent Sileadh cities and holdings. After the War was won, and humans had their freedom, things seemed good for a time; rulers of these places were called Princes and had a moderate amount of sovereignty under their agreement with the newly crowned Empress. Until the humans forgot their pacts and turned on the elves for their adherence to heathen ways. One by one, the cities were destroyed until only Nenilmare remained. The unruly mob calling themselves crusaders eventually reached the front gates, and on that day Prince Ruler-in-Dark-Times fought to the very last man as the crusaders razed the city. Time has worn away at what remained until the site has reached its present state -- little more than a few walls of masonry atop a steep hill overlooking a river valley. The structures that remain seem to have been part of the city's upper-class areas, namely the palace and ancestral tomb of the Princes.

The dungeon is thus organized into four areas - the exterior, which consists of the surface and ruined basements, undercrofts, and secret tunnels that are barely beneath the ground; this is the first two levels of the dungeon. It is populated with low-level creatures such as a cougar, an ogre, and bandits that have camped out in the dolmens created by the post-crusade humans from the megaliths left behind by the razing of the city. The bandits and the ogre have a kind of understanding -- the ogre gets the eastern side of the site and mostly sticks to the undercrofts, they get the western side and can walk freely among the ruins.

Aucelie, or the catacombs, are the remains of the city's underground. They are old sewers, hidden libraries, and crypts of the lesser nobles and commoners. Here there are more monsters, lesser undead that have wandered up from the depths, beasts that feed upon the detritus of a long-dead civilization, and some rumors of alien plants that have crept down in here to feed on the moulds and bones of the waning undead.

Deeper still is the Old City, Nenilmare Lendasan. The Great Way. Here the more powerful undead remain, still serving their long-dead masters, and the old summoned creatures, Tenevra from Strages, live on in torment unable to die yet filled with bloodlust. The great riches of this part of the city are ripe for the taking, with very few who have entered here able to survive its denizens.

The deepest part of the Old City is San Arod Tar, the Hall of the Noble King who made that ill-fated oath to the Empress long ago. Here you can find the Shield Lords, guardians of the lineage of the Princes. Powerful Tenevra stalk these halls, duty bound to follow their masters' orders even all these millennia later. The restless undead, enraged by the betrayal of their descendants, strike mercilessly at anything that yet lives. Most curious of all, there are signs of a recent intruder -- but who could be so powerful to have delved so deeply?

Something that I really want to get across with this dungeon is the sense of waves of occupation. The old city is old, almost 2,000 years have passed since it was buried. The pogroms that destroyed the layer of Lendasan and higher were about 800 years ago. Then there are the current inhabitants. The ogre has been here for an indeterminable amount of time, while the bandits have been here a week or so. They have no idea how long ago the city was made, or even really what it is. The ghosts and other undead might be able to tell some details, maybe, but are mad with rage and despair. The Prince himself was prepared to become a Lich, but his spirit was allowed to go on to rest in-between but there is a contingency in place that he can be called up if needed. It has only happened once -- when his descendant, the Prince Ruler-in-Dark-Times, was betrayed by his three most trusted advisors. As the crusaders put them to the sword while standing over their betrayed prince, the risen lich rose up through the tiles as though he were incorporeal. He blasted the human invaders to ash, then bound up the traitors with magic. He cursed them to live in agony, commanding the army of undead that would defend the halls of Nenilmare in its own afterlife forever. Now, the Lich sleeps, but the true prize of Nenilmare is his crown -- the Feathered Crown of Nenilmare, which is said to grant a sorcerous power unlike any other.

Rooms 1-7

1. "Room" 1 is part of the second largest extant structure -- seemingly an art gallery of some kind where the nobles would come to admire stoneworks and gaze out at the sunset playing across the water of the gentle river which now threatens to swallow up even the meager reminders this place was ever here. There are several dead bodies outside the door, bandits who fell prey to some mysterious magical threat. A staircase down into an undercroft looms forebodingly in the corner.
2. This long, narrow chamber is totally open to the sky. Inside, there are rows and rows of shattered statues. There is a foul stench in here, of death and a slight hint of ammonia.
3. This "room" is a small dock, constructed of roughly hewn logs. There is a small watchtower, now crumbled to ruin, and a destroyed section of wall. A boat has been pulled up onto shore and tied to a stake.
4. On the far side of the exterior of the site is a series of "rooms" all adjacent forming sections of a semicircle -- part of the old keep and manor of the Prince. This room's purpose seems to have been a room of remembering the ancestors -- statues of proud elven princes line the walls, but most have since been shattered. There is a foul stench in here, as well as piles of an unidentified material in all but one corner of the room; the corner with no ceiling.
5. Back at the ruined gallery, this room's original purpose is unclear, but it has long since been raided save for a few stone chests. There are shrubs growing out of the ruined masonry built up along the inside wall.
6. This room was a vault of some kind, with an elaborate, but now unlocked, stone door. Inside it has largely been looted, save for four chests. There is a dead bandit propped up against a wall at the far end of the room, near a window that is clear enough to vault through and gain access to the outside.
7. There are a series of dolmens built into the side of the mound, for what purpose none can say though they make good shelter for the passerby. A small camp has been made in the middle of the dolmens, with several bedrolls laid out in open air around the campfire. The bandits make their camp here.
8. Back at the ruined keep, this room seems to have been an atrium of some kind but now its roof is gone and the gardens overgrown with various weeds. There are many footprints of some kind of beast in here...

Conclusion

And that's all I have for now. There will hopefully be fifty-one more of these posts. The second level will be much more traditionally dungeon-like with rooms and halls and such, but I think I'm allowed to stretch the rules of my own self-imposed challenge a little. I'll accompany this post with a scan of my map so far. Like I said I'm no artist and doing this by hand is going to be a process of trial and error. At any rate, I'm finishing up my procedure tweaks for Covenant & Empire so that will probably be my next post if I don't make another Dungeon26 post before then. If anything here was intriguing to you, feel free to comment on Bluesky³.

Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies.

Footnotes