The Greatest Dungeon Ever Designed
This is what peak dungeon design looks like.
We made this dungeon on the fly using Appendix A of the greatest RPG book ever written, and it lasted for a solid three sessions of live play. We had parties of ten, then six, then nine delve this one and wring it for every last XP of value. It doesn’t provide near enough XP to level ten characters, but it makes for a good warm-up for a bigger prize.
We’re learning a lot about solo RPG play, AD&D, and how to solo play as a group over on the channel. There’s something very satisfying about walking away from the drama kid version of D&D and just letting the dice do the creation for you. You can easily capture a very similar sense of mystery and exploration to that experienced during GM-facing play, but there are a lot of bad habits that take some time to break out of. You will always have a tendency to get out over your skis – the nature of the hobby encourages you to look down the road and plan accordingly – but with this kind of gaming there is no there ahead of you. There is only a formless void, and you can only make sense of what things mean after the fact. Any attempt to “steer the game” is doomed to failure, and worse, adds an incentive to abandon the game and the dice in favor of your own expectations. Which negates the whole purpose of the exercise – to explore the unknown.
You deserve a more detailed analysis than that, but it’ll have to go into it’s own blog post. This one is just to slap a random dungeon down on the table so that any DM can pick it up and run it.