A Psychedelic One-Shot Dungeon, A PS1-Like Dungeon Crawler And News

June 06, 2025

A Psychedelic One-Shot Dungeon, A PS1-Like Dungeon Crawler And News

Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #9 📜

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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
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Summary

🦇Temple Of The Bat Serpent: A Psychedelic One-Shot Dungeon
👹Labyrinth Of The Demon King: A PS1-Like Dungeon Crawler
🧙🏼‍♂️What I’m Up To: Breathless Jam Devlog & A Feelgood Weekend

🦇Temple Of The Bat Serpent: A Psychedelic One-Shot Dungeon

Many years ago, the monks mysteriously abandoned their monastery on Mount Desmodus, never to be seen again. Local legends tell of foolish explorers who disappeared after traveling that far up the mountain. People who’ve wandered too close to the monastery’s stone entrance claim they’ve seen something staring back at them from that black maw of a doorway. Surely, strange things lurk in the dark shadows of Desmodus.

With that introduction,

Nate Treme gives this one-shot dungeon a very special vibe.

Temple Of The Bat Serpent is one of a kind pamphlet made by the amazing Nate treme, who’s known for Tunnel Goons (and who I already talked about in this previous newsletter about business card TTRPG).

Why is this one-shot so cool? Because of its dungeon’s mood: it got drunk and eyeless monks, weird things happening and a lot of subtle info to maintain the atmosphere for your players..
It’s also well made in terms of narrative progression. Each keyed room has a subtle hint of what is happening in this dungeon and will slowly reveal the dungeon’s secrets to the players.

The game is intended to be played with Ben Milton’s Knave but can easily be played with any other OSR.
It comes with a 1d4 Random Encounters table, with the full bestiary used in the dungeon (stats, monsters’ special abilities etc.), 2 special magic spells, and d6 rumors from the local villagers and the dungeon is all keyed with 7 “rooms”.
With all of that, you have the perfect non-prep dungeon you can get!

I love the game’s unique map design. It’s inspired by one of my favorite video game genre: Roguelike.
Those kinds of games use ASCII characters to make their map (often Dungeons, as they are hugely inspired by TTRPGs).
Here is an example I’ve made in a Google Drive Text, showing a ruin:

@ → Character
, ; : → Stones debris
. → Ground (tree, floor, dirt etc depending on the color)
▒ ░ ▓ → Walls
X → Cadavre
~ → Fluide, red is blood, blue is water etc

Temple Of The Bat Serpent’s map was made using REXPaint, an awesome ASCII tool made by Kyzrati (aka Grid Sage Games) who is very famous in the Roguelike scene for his game Cogmind and for being a huge contributor to the whole Roguelike scene in general.

We planned to play it last Sunday at my table, but we were too busy eating a vegan BBQ on our bonfire (see What I’m Up To below).

We had the time to generate the character with Caverns Of Heresy’s Rogueland rules, as it is my go-to OSR, and as it is mainly inspired by Knave.

I’m sure we’ll have a blast playing this dungeon! 😀

You can find Nate Treme’s Temple Of The Bat Serpent here. 🛕🦇🐍

👹Labyrinth Of The Demon King: A PS1-Like Dungeon Crawler

The World has entered The Latter Age Of The Dharma. Society is crumbling. War has spread throughout the country. Disease and famine have killed thousands, and demons walk the very earth itself. You are an Ashigaru, a footsoldier in the service of Lord Takeda Nobumitsu. Deceived by a powerful demon, your lord led his army into an ambush. All perished except for you. Against your wishes your lord sacrificed his life to aid your escape from the battle. You have made a vow to track down the demon who betrayed your lord and end its life. Following rumours of an entrance to the demon’s stronghold, you find yourself standing on a lonely road deep in some long forgotten forest. You take what could possibly be your final breaths on this mortal plane, and prepare yourself to enter…

Imagine a game with the grim Playstation 1 tones and textures that made Silent Hill famous and the harsh gameplay (in a good sense) from Kingsfield and you get J.R. Hudepohl’s Labyrinth Of The Demon King.

In this cruel world, you will have to defeat the demon that killed your lord. To access this final encounter you will have to defeat 4 bosses in 4 towers. These towers are like dungeons, where you have to find specific objects to progress, like in any old-school Survival Horror - think of Resident Evil 1’s manor. And these places will make your guts screams to leave and never return.
You’ll fight weird creatures in ‘tactical’ combat (parry, light attack, heavy attack etc.) and you can also (rarely) loot better stuff.

Some tips here: take a notebook if you want to play that game, there’s a lot of info that you can forget between game session and each little thing that you can read in the game/lore can be useful to progress. You’ll have a little “quest”, but no in-game journal to remind you of what you have to do.

Everything is grim and gruesome. Creatures are fighting against each other in the most gory way, weird centipedes poisons you, and even friendly NPCs are cutting pieces from the monsters to eat them. The old-school textures ala Playstation makes it even gloomy added to the amazing Remu Daifuku’s Noise/Ambient soundtrack which reminds me of Silent Hill’s one.
The sound design is also utterly gloomy and makes you stressed all the time, even when speaking with all the weird NPCs because of their grim voices.

If you’re a fan of Plastiboo’s works like Vermis (see my newsletter about it here) or even Junji Ito’s works, you’ll love it!

I truly had a blast playing it, even though it’s very stressful and makes you fear its world. What a vibe!

Labyrinth Of The Demon King is a true gem that you can play on a lot of platforms: Playstation 4 & 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch and PC. 👹

🧙🏼‍♂️What I’m Up To: Breathless Jam Devlog & A Feelgood Weekend

As you may have read in the last newsletter, I’m working on an adventure for the Breathless Jam 2 which takes place in a prison as a zombie outbreak starts.

At the moment, it goes very well, I’ve completed two “Starting Items” tables and a “Why are you in jail?” table. I’m working on the loot table and a timetable where events are coming each real 15 minutes, increasing the prison’s tension.
I need to quickly start the whole prison map with key and room indication as it will take some time to do.

Last weekend, It was very sunny where we live in France. So we wanted to go to the sea, not that far from home (1 hour of driving). We traveled to our almost local sea-swamp with a friend of ours (who is the other member of my TTRPG table along with my SO) and we had a great Saturday walking with our dogs.

But we wanted to keep this whole “holiday” mood and decided to chill at our local lake, in our friend’s van. Yes, he lives in a nice and long van 😛

As we didn’t want to leave this place, we put a bed sheet and mattress into my car and slept in it for the night with our dogs. It was fun yet uncomfortable because of my dog literally sleeping on me 😂

It’s been 10 years that I dream of having a van and going on weekends and holidays with it. And it’s been a year and a half that I’m really saying to myself that I should do it now. That’s why we are seriously looking into used ones to replace my car, and we’ve found some that we need to check out. 😀

Then, on Sunday, we made a vegan BBQ, as our friend is vegan (I don’t care if I don’t eat meat. After 10 years in the worst part of the meat industry, I have a very peculiar feelings towards meat…). It was tasty and fun to improvise our very first BBQ on the bonfire! We will definitely make more!

I’m happy to have made a new digital collage/photobashing art as you can see in the Temple Of The Bat Serpent paragraph up there. I love doing that kind of stuff even if I’m a total beginner in photo editing, but I always have a blast doing these.

That’s it for this week!

Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀

See you next Friday!

Cheers !
Sleepdrifter

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