Dungeon Room Index: Preservation Rooms

Preservation rooms! The places where things are kept safe, for their value, or simply for their future utility.

Here are the rooms:

Saving stuff for later

The basic gist of a "preservation room" is storing stuff. However, throughout this series we've dipped into that idea in many ways: Armories store armor and weapons; Libraries store books and similar things; Food Rooms included various kinds of food storage; Galleries included museum like spaces... we could go on, but calling Tombs "storage for dead stuff" is verging on silly.

What that leaves us is actually quite appropriate in the context of dungeons: we haven't really talked about storing valuables. Given that dungeons--classically speaking--are places where you find treasure (in all its forms), it only makes sense that you'd wander into some kind of vault or treasury. At least sometimes.

Of course, that's not all we could place in this category; we've also touched only sparingly on rooms dedicated to various forms of record keeping. These can hide a different sort of treasure: information.

Whatever the sort of storage you're aiming for you can generate ideas with a few simple prompts:

• What sorts of things would these dungeon builders hold precious?
• What would they need or want to remember?
• What would they need to keep extra stock of?
• To what lengths would they go to to protect these things?

Room Notes

Vaults

A simple hall lined with secured vaults. (Basically just big metal doors with complex locks.) Each vault is hardly large enough to stand inside, and at least one's door is rusted right off the hinges.

A secure corridor of vaults. These vault doors sport small barred windows revealing the contents within--enticing the would-be thief with their glittering riches.
I've arranged this corridor with two entrances separated by a meaningful distance. For the sake of believability, those doors should themselves have at least the appearance of security--even if the doors are left ajar, or locking mechanisms are compromised. I imagine these doors or connected by a simple hallway, but as I'd like to gently pressure players to enter this hallway full of charms (and probably hidden dangers) I imagined the hall is blocked with some kind of collapse or impediment.

Stairs descend into a larger, high ceilinged vault, lined with smaller individual vaults and lockboxes embedded into the walls. The inner vaults are more like cells with barred doors, and the main feature of this vault is a large reinforced "cage" holding something of particular allure.

Another large vault, this time more toroidal in shape. Along with individual vaults with heavy, circular doors lining the outer wall, the main feature is a large pool of acid and a central platform hosting this vaults most valuable asset.

Behind a large, secure and ornate door lies a series of vats, brimming with coins. A poorly hidden passage lies behind a statue at the back of the hall. This may seem a curious defect in the vault's security, but it is the clue that gives away the vault's true nature:
the coins are fake. Simple iron painted to appear as gold, long since tarnished. The vault was built as a boastful facade.

This simple vault employs an unusual method to protect its goods: they're sunk to the bottom of a watery pit. A strong swimmer who can hold their breath for a long time would be able to reach the bottom, but surfacing again with heavy treasure is another matter.

A simple room filled with treasure chests. The room isn't terribly secure, so it isn't terribly surprising that the chests are empty. Nothing but sand inside.
One of the larger chests holds a surprise however: underneath the sand is a trapdoor leading to a secret chamber below.

Another simple room filled with treasure chests, however, this room has flooded from a leak somewhere in the ceiling above. Given the doors on both sides, you might miss them if you didn't take the time to look.

This vault can only be accessed from a grate in the roof. Once you enter, you are faced with four statues, and valuable treasures on pedestals behind them. Naturally, the statues will spring to life if the outer circle of the room is breached.

Treasuries

In my mind, the difference between a vault and a treasury is how much you want to flaunt the wealth. Both are likely to be secure to some degree, but showing off is a lot harder when your treasure is locked up too tight.

A series of parallel halls are lined with pedestalled alcoves and barred cells. Each contains a trophy, or pile of goods, or a statue adorned with fine jewelry. Or at least they used to--the only valuable stuff left is in a few of the cells that remain unbreached.

The pillared, lower vault sports pedestals topped with trophies of various kinds. The head of the chamber with a loftier ceiling features a grand statue of the dungeon's original regal owner, surrounded by heavy iron doors gilded with fancy metalwork.

Record rooms

We've touched on these just a bit in other recent entries, but we can expand on the idea. Record rooms might contain all sorts of documents: contracts, charters, deeds, genealogies, receipts, logbooks, journals, maps, surveys ...basically anything you wouldn't read for pleasure. (That doesn't mean the contents aren't useful!)

A simple record room: a central table surrounded by shelves. These shelves are filled with records of transactions and land deeds. They were dusty when they were written.

Pillars accompanied by long tables, covered in dusty scrolls and melted candles. Shelves filled with crumbling and tattered codices line the walls. The records in this room are contracts and genealogies; scholars and servants were sent to establish claims of nobility or establish legal claims.

This record room is cluttered with a disorderly array of shelves and tables. The tomes are infested with silverfish, booklice, and moth larvae. It's anyone's guess what was written on the faded and moldy pages.

Cramped corridors are lined with drawers and shelves, brimming with scrolls and the occasional jarred specimen. Faded etchings at the base of the shelves indicate some sort of indexing system was in use, though not one you've ever heard of. The space between shelves is uncomfortably narrow, and the air is choked with dust.

Stairs descend into a plain room with a few shelves. The focal point is a central set of shelves that rotate in the wall. The mechanism is rusted stiff, but with effort you can turn it to reveal a tall alcove, large enough to admit a person. Turning it further with an occupant will reveal a hidden room behind where forbidden history is stored.

The builders of this dungeon stored their records in an unconventional form: etched into bones. A long table houses boxes of such bones, while shelves along the walls hold urns with long bandages, inked with tiny script. Adjacent rooms appear to house sarcophagi, but it is only more records--stored on bones.
The bones appear humanoid, and they are marked with records of heritage and significant events.

Most would not even recognize this record room as such. A single scholarly statue is centrally featured, and long knotted ropes adorn the walls. The knots are intricate, encoding meaning in the sequence and type of knot used. It's anyone's guess what it all means.

A single huge slab of stone dominates this ceremonial looking chamber. The slab is inscribed with rows and rows of tiny runes in a single, continuous block of text. Faint traces of metallic paint can be seen in the grooves, indicating that the slab was once quite decorated. Now only bits and traces are reflected in torch light like stars on a gray night sky. This slab is said to contain the entire thousand year history of the long dead empire that built this place, but the most important details--the beginnings of that empire--are missing; broken off and crumbled on the floor around you.

Three parallel rooms are lined with shelves from floor to ceiling. Each shelf is packed with tightly rolled scrolls and heavy books: the convoluted tax codes of a kingdom that has long since collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy.

Tall thick pillars are lined with niches, spiraling up with accompanying staircases. Catwalks connect the stairs and pillars to another entrance on an upper level.
These are the personal records of an ancient lich, cataloging the contracts and devil's bargains of hundreds of years of undeath. While his soul phylactery is hidden away somewhere much more secure, the story of his rise to power is recorded here in a thousand coercive and lopsided deals.

Storage

A handful of somewhat generic storage rooms, just to cover our bases.

A long chamber with low vaulted ceilings. Crates and barrels are grouped and piled haphazardly. Their contents are of all manner: foodstuffs, tools, rolls of leather or parchment, and so on. There is no organizing principle; whoever placed them simply had to remember where everything was.

A square, pillared storage room. The outer wall is vaulted, and the central vault is high, reaching to a grate in the ceiling that lets in a little light. Crates are pushed into loose groups around the room in various states of decay.

A single long corridor with shelves at angles. The shelves are lined with odd shaped jars and bottles. Many are broken and cobwebbed, others contain strangle looking malformed creatures in putrid colored liquid. Still others hold a variety of multi-colored fluids.

This storage room is arranged in a tall vertical shaft, with several open levels crowded with shelves and barrels. Ladders at each end connect the levels, and some sort of pulley system hangs down the center of the space.

Bonus stuff

Entities to find in a preservation room:

• A pile-of-coins mimic. Even WotC has good ideas sometimes.
• Animated statue/armor guardian. Make it more interesting by choosing a shape that isn't humanoid.
• Talking bust. Not dangerous; just annoying.
• Animated books/scrolls
• Automaton/construct guardian. More fun when it is well hidden or disguised, and re-assembles when the vault is threatened.
• Long-dead burglar.
• Long-undead burglar.
• Coin-ooze. Like an ooze, but made of coins; or just brimming with them--did you know that gold is resistant to acids?
• Genie in a bottle. (Or other artifact.)
• Skeletal scribes and record-keepers.
• Some dude who's really into tax law.

Traps activated when you steal the MacGuffin in the vault:

• The dungeon floods rapidly from somewhere above.
• The entrance to the vault collapses. The only other exit is through ventilation or sewage shafts.
• Doors are sealed and poison gas fills the room from holes in the bottom of the pillars.
• A huge pack of hungry giant roaches are released into the vault.
• The treasure itself is alive and will attack. It must be restrained and hauled out so it can be disenchanted by a professional.
• An illusory enchantment hides all the exits and changes the apparent configuration of the room.
• You can only take one object from the vault. The rest are immediately dropped into lava as soon as anything is disturbed. (Or, all the valuables are behind locked gates, and a mechanism drops them if a gate is broken into.)
• A large mechanical eye watches intruders and shuts down vaults if anyone get's close. An aspirant burglar must distract the eye or avoid it's attention to nab anything.

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