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Do you need a jailbreak scenario for your tabletop roleplaying game that you can run in under three hours? One that you can play as a one off or drop into an ongoing campaign? One with potential for political intrigue and hooks to different factions? Well, you’re in luck because that’s what I’ll be talking about today.

In fact, you don’t even need to read all this post with me yapping about it because you can grab a pdf copy of The Inquisitor’s Prison absolutely free right here or on DriveThruRPG.

However, if you’re the kind of person who likes to know how sausages are made, get a drink, sit down, and let’s go over the design of this adventure.

This scenario was designed for the DungeonTuber’s Dungeon Jam, in which several great tabletop roleplaying youtubers like Mystic Arts, Knigobi, Trekiros and Corkboards and Curiosities are releasing free scenarios of all sorts. The theme is five room dungeons, but other than that everyone is freewheeling.

So what are five room dungeons anyway?

A five room dungeon is a specific narrative structure originally codified by Johnn Four – ironic, I know – so let’s start from there so we can see what we’re working with. To be clear, it doesn’t need to be a dungeon dungeon – that’s just an easier way to say “place where the adventure happens”. The rooms don’t have to be actual rooms either, more like scenes or situations, but there have to be five to fit this structure.

The first room is the Entrance or Guardian. This can be any obstacle which prevents the players from getting into the dungeon proper. It can be a puzzle, dangerous terrain the characters must traverse, or even an actual guardian. The important thing is that the players get to start the adventure with some action and that the obstacle gives them some information about the adventure ahead.

The second room is a Puzzle or Roleplaying challenge. The idea here is that there’s a change of pace for your players; for example if the entrance was a combat scene, now they get to catch their breath and think or talk their way past the next obstacle. Or maybe there isn’t even an obstacle, they just meet someone who could help them in the upcoming rooms.

The third room is the Trick or Setback. Here you get an unexpected problem. This maybe a trap, or maybe the abandoned temple you were exploring is now a nest of giant snakes. Or maybe someone you made friends with in the previous room turns traitor.

The fourth room is the Climax – this is the big boss fight, the last obstacle before getting to the payoff.

The fifth and final room is the Reward, Revelation, or Plot Twist. In the simplest terms, this is where they get the treasure. You can also throw a wrench in here; maybe they get to the treasure room only to find it was looted years ago.

Fleshing things out with a theme

Now that we have a structure, we need a theme to be able to put some meat on it. Personally, I like to draw from history, and I just happened to see a paper about the Inquisitor’s Palace (now the National Ethnography Museum) not far from where I live; I thought it would be interesting to base it around that.

I found the 1698 plans which I thought would make mapping easier, but ended up redrawing the map to serve the structure of the adventure, so the layout is quite different to the real thing. However they do have a virtual experience on Google Maps if you want to see what that looks like.

Just so you know, I also made the whole thing a bit more trope-heavy than I usually like to do. The Roman inquisition weren’t fantastic guys but they were a lot easier going than their Spanish colleagues; that was fudged a bit for story purposes here.

The place has a small prison complex inside it, so breaking someone out of it before they’re made to spill their beans started to sound like an idea. Now we can start fleshing out the rooms.

Getting in

I decided to set the entrance just before the entrance to the prison rather than the door of the palace. This is a fairly large building, so it would be easy for the players to wander off and get lost. Instead, they start off in a small room with a clerk and some guards.

Their objective here is to be let into the prison, one way or the other. They could try to bribe their way in, pretend to be maintenance staff, or claim to be someone’s lawyers. As Professor Dungeon Master likes to say, I don’t need to find solutions for the players, I just need to design a problem for them to solve. My intention here was to let the players figure out that the guards are fairly lazy but won’t take any crap.

I ran this as a playtest for my group when two the players couldn’t make it to a session. Questboard Terrain and Chris managed to work their way in by pretending to be a nun and a drunken blasphemer she had apprehended on the street. The combined roleplaying of those two was enough to get them past this point.

Exploring the prison

For the Puzzle/roleplaying room I went for the cells and the prison courtyard. Now, I’m not entirely certain whether prisoners were allowed time in the yard, but since the prisoners were mostly kept in communal cells and the inquisition here cared enough for their wellbeing that they made sure they had windows and toilets, I figured it was plausible enough.

Another thing I fudged here was the nature of the prisoners. In reality most of the prisoners would have been everyday people accused of religious crimes. To add a little tension, some of the prisoners in the game are dangerous criminals that would normally have been dealt with by civil authorities. But, you know, it’s perfectly possible to be both.

Here we have a couple of things for the players to puzzle out. First, they need to discover that the person they want to rescue was taken to the torture chamber. The first one is pretty easy if they manage to befriend some of the prisoners; the second one is trickier as the guards will stop anyone if they see them heading towards the torture chamber.

My players befriended an old man who wanted in on their escape plan and gave them all the details; he also promised to give them some money he had stashed away outside. Chris caused a diversion by picking a fight with a snitch, which Questboard Terrain used to slip unnoticed up the stairs to the torture chamber.

Finding the mark

The torture chamber is the Trick room. The players will find their target here, along with a torturer, a scribe, and a stack of papers. To rescue their target, they will need to get rid of the torturer somehow, but they also need to get hold of the papers to make sure no evidence gets out.

Now this is a very small room, and I want to lean into the torture room tropes for this one so it’s full of sharp and scary implements; if the players get into a fight here, any time they miss they risk taking some damage. Besides that, they risk the prison guards coming up behind them unless they bar the door somehow.

My players started a fire as a distraction, barred the door behind them, then took out the torturer and burnt all the papers.

The Escape

Once they’ve rescued the target, the players can start making their exit, but you might have noticed we’re missing the climax room. Don’t worry. An alarm sounds, and as the players find their way into the street, they notice guards start to push their way through the crowd to their positions.

The random civilians will start running as soon as they see anyone draw weapons, but the crowd can knock someone over if they bump into them. If any civilians get injured, a riot will break out which could be very dangerous for the everyone involved.

This plays out as a large but straightforward combat scene with moving obstacles. The point here is to escape, not to beat all the guards. However, props to Chris for knocking two guards over with a runaway donkey.

Just Desserts

Once they break free we can move on to the Reward, Revelation, or Plot Twist. Or maybe all three – I want a few layers here depending on what happened during the scenario. You don’t have to have all three, but I think they fit really well here.

The reward is easy. If they finished their mission, they get paid.

The revelation depends on whether they collect the papers or not – they might discover something about their employer or another faction in the game. My play testers burnt the papers so they didn’t get this, though they did get a bonus for doing so.

The plot twist comes along if they rescued the little old man. My plan was to let them find the stash of money he had promised them, and later on have them hear about some serial killer who had started operating again.. As I was bouncing the idea off Bone Wizard, he suggested to go heavier and more obvious, especially for a one shot. The players find a box with the money they were promised… and a pile of mummified severed left hands. I loved the players’ reactions to this, the whoops was real!

Conclusion

I think that’s a great setup for an evening of play. It is slightly more difficult to break out of this than it was to break out of the real thing. After all one guy managed to escape by digging through the outer wall eight times in a year, and three guys once managed to break out because the jailer had forgotten to lock the prison gate. There wouldn’t have been so many guards for sure, although I think the addition makes for a better game.

That’s all from me today; remember to grab your free pdf here or here, and make sure you check out the videos in this playlist for more five room dungeons! Hope you sinners and heretics have a great week. Bye!