The Tainted Well

This is a dungeon I ran a couple years ago in Gazyantep.  

It was a bit rushed and sloppy, but you might find an idea worth stealing.  The players had a lot of fun with it.  

I'm planning on repurposing the design for the new and improved Gazyantep setting, but here's what we had the first time around.

We were using the OD&D rules provided by Swords and Wizardry, with a few magic items from the AD&D DM's guide.

The whole thing was based on this killer Wayne Reynolds illustration from the Pathfinder PHB: 

Location
In any town, underground.

Blurb - spoilers
A death-cult of Set worshippers has set up an underground lair and are feeding townsfolk to a flesh golem they're growing.

Hook

In one of the poor quarters of the town, people have been disappearing after nightfall.  2 or 3 people a night.  Tracking the abductors, ambushing the abductors, or questioning a suspicious apothecary in the quarter leads the players to an old unused well.

So, my map is a little strange.  The shaft leading down from the well there is vertical (obviously), as are any of the stairs.  There's a trapdoor on the left there that drops down into the chamber below.  

There's an alternate way in or out of the dungeon, by taking a passage that winds up at a secret door in the basement of the suspicious apothecary's shop.

The idea of the dungeon was this:

The well, which is letting out a ferocious corpselike stench, leads down about 30 feet to a hollow chamber in the earth.  It's full of half-eaten carrion and yellow mold.

The rest of the dungeon has a few features I thought might be interesting:

• The chamber with an ochre jelly has 3 passageways connected to it.  2 of them are narrow enough that the jelly will have to squeeze through, slowing it.
• The room with the flesh golem (lemure) has it trapped under a 6' diameter grating.  Looks like the cultists haven't been able to tame it yet.  It'll get out in 1d6-2 turns of entering the chamber, and it'll rampage through PCs and monsters alike.
• There's a magical stasis trap protecting a Magic Item Drop (MD, on the map).  The first time I ran this dungeon, two players got to this room.  The warrior grabbed the magic item and got frozen for d6-1 turns.  The rogue tied him up, took all of his stuff, set everything he could on fire so he couldn't be followed, and ran out of the dungeon.     
• If you'd like to make the map more complicated, have the shaft of the well run further down to a tainted pool.  It can connect via underground river to the easternmost chamber with a faint pencil "WASH OUT" denoted.  That means the bricks of the walls have been knocked aside and there's an opening to the river there.  This gives you a dangerous connection across the map.  Dangerous because of the river's current, but also because 3 lamia (here, a daughter of the evil god Set, basically a sinister mermaid with a serpent lower half) can be found either in the bottom of the well shaft or in the far chamber to the east.

Here was the high point of the game - in the chamber to the East marked MD, magic item drop, and S, for secret door, there was a sarcophagus containing a dead cultist leader.  

One of the players rolled an evil magic sword for the drop, and I went with blood-drinking power (e.g. get +1 to hit for each foe slain earlier in the combat, to a max of +4).  I love Stormbringer, if you can't tell.  

So to match the flesh golem theme, I told them it looked like a jagged set of shattered bones held together with strings of tendon and skin, with vertebrae at the crosspiece.

 

When they got into the chamber with the sarcophagus, the player decided - for some reason - to lay the sword on the preserved body of the cult lord to see what happened.  "The bones shift and lengthen," I said, "and seem to grow teeth.  The sword begins to eat the corpse."

Well, the players all went nuts.  They seemed to think that was pretty rad.  Anyways, if you need an evil sword, give that a shot in your own campaign if you'd like.