Sunday, February 22, 2015

Return to the Megadungeon: The Dragon Sublevel

A couple of years ago, this blog presented readers with the first ten levels of a miniature mega-dungeon.  The series ended abruptly when the hard drive on which it rested gave up the digital ghost.  Over the last few months a few loyal readers have asked for an explanation, and rather than provide one...aside from the previous sentence...I finally dug up the old hard drive and grabbed the necessary files to finish the thing off.

By way of a refresher, what we're doing here is stocking one of Dyson Logos' impressive full page maps. The only things left to detail are the final boss level, which contains a lich imprisoned by his own limited spell set.  The poor crazed thing is a fire-based mage whose escape has been barred by a powerful creature immune to fire attacks.  Before we get to that final level, though, there are a couple of nooks and crannies left to flesh out.  Sublevels like the green dragon lair in the upper left hand corner only reachable by pulling yourself upstream against the swift underground current.




In retrospect, and having spent time reading through the amazing amount of material scattered throughout the OSR-verse, this dungeon might not be very playable.  It's way too cramped.  Moldvay, Holmes, and the great Gygax himself suggest having plenty of open space, and there aren't very many of those in this dungeon.

More good news on the recovered hard drive front!  I've found a few full-blown modules that I put together almost ten years ago.  These are for Third Edition D&D, and designed for use under the OGL, but they should be suitable for any edition or any OGL game.  Give me a few days to polish one up, and if there's interest, I can probably bang out a few more with little effort.

1 comment:

  1. Yay! It's back!

    Given that you take the "dungeon as mythic underworld" idea further than most anyway, perhaps your concerns about playability can be addressed by just substantially increasing the scale. Individual GMs might then want to add details to some areas, making some of the bigger rooms small dungeons in their own right.

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