Monday, January 23, 2012

Unfrozen Caveman Dice-Chucker: DMG Sample Dungeon

     

     I have a fondness for Sample Dungeons. Not just the Zenopus dungeon - all of them from various TSR products. So I enjoyed reading Timrod's new series at Unfrozen Caveman Dice-Chucker delving into the 1E AD&D DMG Sample Dungeon (by Gary Gygax). There are two entries so far:


    As an aside, a redrawn version of the map for this dungeon appeared again as a sample dungeon in the 3.0E DMG, and then a finished 3.0E version of this dungeon by Jonathan Tweet appeared in Dungeon #84 (2001) under the title Dungeon of the Fire Opal (still available from Paizo as a pdf).

     By the way, the illustration in Timrod's blog banner is from the early versions of the Blue Book. It's by DCSIII and shows a party of three facing off against a purple worm. It was originally found below the Purple Worm monster entry but was deleted in the 2nd Edition (Nov 78) when the Monster List entries were reformatted. Not surprising as Timrod is yet another blogger who started with the Blue Book. See his 2010 post, Primordial D&D, discussing this in the wake of the passing of Holmes. 

Edit: Here's the Dragonsfoot version of the DMG Sample Dungeon. It's called The Monastery of the Order of the Crimson Monks, and is for levels 5-9:

http://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FE&fileid=309&watchfile=0
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3 comments:

  1. Timrod January 24, 2012 at 10:38 AM

    Hey--Thanks for noticing! I'm considering giving Zenopus the treatment at some point in the future, though I haven't found a good approach yet. Its quirky nature makes it fairly immune to the sort of analysis I revel in.

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  2. DangersaurusJanuary 24, 2012 at 9:12 PM

    There's a jam module on Dragonsfoot called The Monastery Order of the Crimson Monks that expands the sample dungeon from the AD&D DMG.

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  3. Zenopus ArchivesJanuary 28, 2012 at 2:23 PM

    Right you are, Dangersaurus. Thanks for pointing me to that, I missed that project. I just downloaded and took a look at it. Well done, though higher level than I would've expected.

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