Gus, Mr. Dungeon Crawling himself, asks the hard questions: why do most adventures suck? He suggests ways to improve the adventures you are writing (to sell for cash-money). Something he touches on, that gets glossed over in a lot of the discussions I see about writing and running adventures, is around that distinction between writing to be consumed by yourself versus writing to be consumed by others. You can run an amazing session with keys that look like the original keys for Dwimmermount. You don’t need fancy maps. You don’t need perfect prose. You need enough information to remind yourself of the amazing ideas in your head!
Barrowmaze II is the second part of a two-part exploration-style megadungeon for Labyrinth Lord and other classic fantasy role-playing games. BMII is a continuation of the initial “dungeon sprawl” concept presented in Barrowmaze I (BMI) and is intended for mid-and-high level characters.
I own the PDF of the original dungeon. It’s a pretty creative take on megadungeons. Instead of having multiple levels, each more challenging then the previous one, Barrowmaze is basically a giant sprawling mess of rooms. The further you get from the entrances into the dungeon, the harder the encounters get. Barrowmaze is a crypt, and the room descriptions really play this side of its origin story up. For example, there are lots of sealed up tombs PCs can excavate in search of treasure at the risk of alert monsters to their presence.
Barrowmaze was created by fellow Canadian Greg Gillespie, who runs the blog Discourse & Dragons.
Today is the last day of the BarrowmazeI II funding campaign. It has already reached its funding goals, so its going to be available for purchase sometime in the future, even if you don’t have the funs to support the project right now. There are some nice perks for backers of the project, so if Barrowmaze II is something you think you’ll buy in the future now is the time to act.
