_{(Hi! This is the Sam Tillis DMing newsletter, released once a month maximum. If you’re new here, it’s because I aggressively added your email to the list; if you want out, there’s a link at the bottom of the page. But stick around; we have fun.)}

I’m pleased to report that I achieved a number of my creative Dungeon Master–goals in 2025. I ran my first and second livestreamed games—the first ongoing, the second complete and compact. (I promise I’ll stop harping about this… just in time for Chrome & Fog’s season 2 🙃) I wrapped up the longest professionally-DM’d campaign I’ve ever run (111 sessions!) and ushered a second past the 100-session mark. I ran the most experimental RPG I own, DM’d at a bat mitzvah (still holding out for a quinceañera…), and surprise-dropped one of my longtime groups into the Tomb of Horrors.

But I don’t want to talk about any of that. I want to tell you about the stupidest dungeon I’ve ever designed.

So there’s this group of kids I run birthday party D&D games for. I’m no rube—I’ve got a bunch of stock D&D one-shots I run over and over for kids—but this gang’s been around long enough collectively that I’ve run through all my standard material. Everything I do for them is necessarily bespoke.

That’s fine. I like making stuff. But then, as I was mulling over what I was going to do for the three-hour party, I received this email:

As you can imagine, this send my heart racing and my mind spinning. Could I deliver the chicken-centric content these children craved? What would chicken-based D&D even look like? Inevitably, the phrase “chicken crawl” lodged itself in my head, and so, equally inevitably, a story evolved: to cure a sacred chicken of a mysterious and debilitating disease, the party would have to shrink down to near microscopic size, enter the chicken, poke around for clues, and make it out again before they explosively returned to normal size (with potentially tragicomic repercussions for the chicken).

Here’s how I set it up:

First, I drew the outline of a chicken on a big-old piece of poster paper. (Well, no. Actually, first I did hours of research on chicken anatomy, learning things Mankind Was Not Meant to Know™. Then I drew the chicken.)

This would represent the absolute boundaries of the chicken-dungeon— chiungeon?—but what’s a dungeon without rooms? Every chicken organ would need to be a chamber the players could explore and interact with, but I didn’t want to have to draw them onto the map in real-time during the session. So I took some thick paper and made chicken-organ cutouts I could glue to the map one-by-one as the players explored.

As I built this, I worked out the story of the Cursèd Mealworm that had been fed to the chicken by a corrupted chicken-priest, hacked up stat-blocks for it and the bacteria it was releasing, developed connections between the rooms, and devised a bloodstream-surfing fast-travel minigame. I peppered the chicken with NPCs: lone white blood cell-survivors from decimated platoons, kindly old enzymes, a raging hormone (barbarian). I plotted some likely entrances and exits… though I might as well not have: I strongly suspected these 12-yr-olds were going to enter through the chicken’s butt, and so they did.

With that work accomplished, all that was left to do was color the chicken.

Naturally, the adventure was called “Fowl Play.”

Was it a hit? Reader, after the session, one of my child players (who has been to five of these birthday parties and countless afterschool D&D campaigns) soberly told me that this was the best adventure yet and that I should strongly consider publishing it. When I suggested that normal D&D players might be less interested in chicken-based exploration than he and his friends, he quickly rejoined “how many ‘normal D&D players’ do you know?” Touché, kid. Touché.

Stay weird, y’all. Don’t let your DM get away with running “normal D&D” for you. Make crazy requests and see what happens. And I’ll see you in 2026.