I just wrote the short session report of the third session of Stonehell Dungeon
Here’s a lesson about dungeon design I learned from Stonehell Dungeon: “If you’re writing a dungeon, don’t put a thing that is not the dungeon in front of the dungeon.”
For Stonehell dungeon that would be the gatehouse, but other dungeons have this, too. The Castle of the Mad Archmage has the surface castle (at least the bandits are interesting). The Tomb of Abysthor has the shrines of Thyr and Muir. Rappan Athuk Reloaded has nearly twenty pages of wilderness, up from four pages back for D&D 3.5.
You think it’s a cool idea, it’ll prepare the newbie players, it’ll up the expectations and the excitement, or give you an opportunity to advertise another product of yours – but the net effect is that people will spend three sessions outside the dungeon, and many campaigns will fold without any player character ever putting a foot in the dungeon. Don’t do it.
#RPG #Old School
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Hilarious, and true. Such structures are mini-dungeons in themselves. I sometimes wonder if it might be cooler to, say, explore mini-dungeons and connect them later to make them feel like a bigger network. Imagine if you are exploring a space and you work your way through some cave-in rubble to suddenly find that things seem familiar ... because you entered a dungeon you previously explored from a different entrance, and it has since changed in some way (been infested or some such).
– Ray Otus 2022-03-16 17:40 UTC
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Yeah, totally. I could imagine something like the Tékumel underworld, where you could imagine there being one small dungeon (”temple”) next to another, on and on, connected, but maybe segmented in a way: secret doors, difficult passages, things like that. You can enter the underworld at multiple points, and you can discover more dungeons nearby.
In a way, Peter and I are trying something like that with Monday Dungeons where Stonehell and Barrowmaze are “close” to each other with characters going on missions to either one.
– Alex 2022-03-16 18:03 UTC
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I can see why this is an issue but it does appear from a campaign realism perspective.
In practice? This would happen to me too. So Stonehell get rid of the upper wilderness section, gatehouse and brigand caves supplement?
The downside is you could loose alternative ways to enter the dungeon that way. For example the caves going to LvL 3 and giants on lvl 7 I think?
– Oliver 2022-03-17 13:06 UTC
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It’s true, but the way I see it, those extra entrances are not worth the wilderness exploration. In theory they can be discovered by first level characters exploring the wilderness, but for a good game experience, they are discovered by higher level characters that descended via regular means, found an egress and can now use this new passage to bypass all the higher levels in one go. It improves their game as it allows them to skip levels. The mechanics of the game (first level characters vs. hill giants) makes sure that the reverse does improve the game: there is no point to discovering the ingress at the beginning of the game, and therefore wilderness exploration before reaching the dungeon is unnecessary. At least that’s what it looks like to me.
I know that Sandra said she liked those mini dungeons outside the mega dungeon and used them elsewhere, but that approach doesn’t work for me, since I run either a mega dungeon campaign or a world exploration campaign, not both at the same time. These wilderness locations outside the mega dungeon are made for people that run both at the same time, or that use just the mini dungeons. People like me are unhappy as they thought they got a mega dungeon campaign but are getting wilderness and mini dungeon exploration instead (at first, in any case).
– Alex 2022-03-17 16:41 UTC
