Venture Town: Imagine Anhk-Morpork crossed with Deadwood and seated atop Castle Greyhawk. It's a lawless city of graverobbers, theives and opportunists, all looking to exploit both the single largest source of treasure in the world, and those who risk their lives to retrieve it.
An Earthquake revealed a lost dwarven hall which was defeated in a war with the Underdark. The Drow seemed to have been less interested in looting the treasures of the defeated Dwarves and more interested in rendering the hall uninhabitable. A huge crack in the earth leads into this colossal and impossibly rich dungeon, the greatest in the world by several orders of magnitude. Slowly a boom town began to spring up around the crack to provide services to the newly rich adventurers emerging from the ruins. Soon Venture Town was home to the most expensive gambling halls, taverns, opium dens and brothels in the world, not to mention magic item dealers, loan sharks, insurance brokers, and many competing adventurer's guilds all waiting to drain the last rusty copper from the heroes as they leave town.
It's decades since the founding, the height of the Adventure Boom, and a mere fraction of the lost dwarven city has been explored and exploited. That's where you come in, with your weapons and big dreams.
The Gilded Hole
The Gilded Hole, a large crack in the earth at almost the exact center of town, is a 200 ft. drop down into a cavern built up into a slum by the ancient dwarves. This fall is not called Dead Hero's Drop as a commentary on the morality of the people who fall to their deaths there on a near daily basis.
This first level of the dungeon was long since picked over for loot. It remains lousy with monstrous vermin, however, to this day. The best source of treasure on the first level is looting the bodies of dead adventurers.
The goal is generally to get down to the cavern level, then find a route to one of the deeper level. In the parts of the great hall cut from the living rock are the homes of the important and the wealthy. Here is where you can find forgotten hoards of gold and magic (as well as the worst of the traps left behind by the forces of the Underdark).
