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Friday, July 6, 2012

Dungeon Crawling Like It's 1983!

I wish i had kept all of my old dungeons from when I was a kid / teenager, but alas, most are long gone and probably best forgotten.

I did find this "One-Sheet", if you will, with a dungeon map on front and the keyed locations on the back.

Who needed anything but number of monsters, loot and possible traps when writing up your dungeon? Anything else is just taking up wasted space.

At least I didn't use every single square on the graph paper for the dungeon - there was some actual space being used to keep it all from falling in on itself.

I'm going to guess circe 1983 or so - earlier and I wouldn't have left any free space on the map and much later I would be including "Dungeon Privies", "Air Vents" and "Waste Disposal Chutes".

Still, I notice there is little rhyme or reason as to why this assortment of creatures would be in a dungeon, let alone why they aren't dying off from lack of food (apparently I did include a dungeon stream, which provides water AND is where I place 5 Giant Crocodiles).

Ah, the good old days, when "It just is" was the answer to the rarely spoken question: "How the fuck did all this stuff get in here in the first place?"


6 comments:

  1. I do miss those kind of dungeons. Very Warlock of Firetop Mountain...

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  2. I like that you listed the treasure first, then the monsters.

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  3. @welleran - priorities you know ;)

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  4. I also miss my old Dungeon maps! I wouldn't have to re-stock module dungeons so much if I still had them.

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  5. I didn't get into gaming until 1995 and most of the guys I started playing with didn't really go for the dungeon crawl kind of gaming.

    I did play a lot Fighting Fantasy kind of books though, and really think I missed out on some of the fun by not getting to design my own dungeons. I'd give it a shot now, but my groups have moved even further from the dungeon design days.

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  6. Would you believe - I have a couple of maps from that time - a couple of keys - but not one map goes to the keys or vice versa. Yeah, it took some time for me to include blank space too, I think seeing Holmes after a steady diet of D&D was formative that way.

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