August 28

August 2014 Blog Carnival – Devious Dungeons

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This months carnival is being hosted by Mind Weave Role-Playing Platform and they want to know about dungeons.

A confession.

In all my years of gaming the groups I have played in haven’t really done much in the way of dungeon crawling, our fantasy adventures tend to be wilderness or urban themed with the usual mixture of combat, problem solving, barge burning  and diplomacy.  That’s not to say we haven’t done them, they’re just a rarity.

The one dungeon that I do love more than all the others is the first one I ever ran in module B1: In Search of the Unknown; the Caverns of Quasqueton .

The great thing about the dungeon is that is had advice for a novice DM as well as letting you stock it yourself from the charts and tables in the back of the book.  These charts had treasures; both magical and mundane plus monsters appropriate to the level of the characters.  This ensured that although the general layout remained the same, you could never be sure what lurked in the next room.  On top of this there are several unexplained events so that the dungeon retains a magical quantity.

I found it the ideal starter dungeon and this is why I will come back to it time and again for the nostalgia and the happy memories of me running it.

 


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Posted August 28, 2014 by GeneralTangent in category "fantasy", "RPG

About the Author

I've been gaming on and off since about 1989 and during that period have played with numerous game systems. I'm fluent in a few, have a basic understanding of quite a few more and can get by in others. Somewhere along the way I found time to be a playtester, contribute to an unpublished game supplement and be associated with another gaming magazine written by far more talented people than I. This lead to one infamous article being written in which I followed the letter of the adventure and torched the parties river barge. I'm also listed on http://rpggeek.com as a game designer.