Developing for a Wide Open AD&D Campaign

After running the absolutely tremendous AD&D campaign for eighteen sessions with a criminally small amount of prep, I sat down and developed a devious little dungeon. A masterpiece of dungeon design that is PERFECTLY BALANCED for parties levels 1-3. (There is NO WAY that this thing can be a death trap, I assure you.)

It took hours to work it out, though I could have run the gist of it with just the initial sketch. The game session run off that sketch would have inevitably included something phenomenally stupid made up on the spot, but there you go!

Now, if the players go there they could conceivably spend many sessions unlocking its secrets. If they make multiple visits to this place spread out over enough time, a minimal amount of restocking and re-envisioning aspects of it can potentially stretch out its utility by many orders of magnitude.

By the same token the players can elect never to go there at all. Or they could visit it once and then never return. How do I know this? Experience!

Here’s the complete list of my campaign’s adventuring locations:

• The Sewers of Trollopulous — A single lair there has been visited many times by the party and seen battles with pug men, crystal men, and wererats.
• The Underground Lake — Players visited once and fought spiders on the way out. Never went back because it was too dangerous.
• The Sinkhole Area — The players lowered somebody down to the first room one time but never went any further. Why?
• The Huge Ruined Pile — Home of the psychedelic teleport trap with the bizarre organ puzzle. The session was so weird and the threat of mushroom men so ominous, the players have never returned.
• The Undead Quarter — The party met their necromancer neighbors and spent the night, but did NOT enjoy the experience. Some daylight exploration and tracking was done by a couple of player characters during their down time, but none of the resulting leads were followed up on.
• Mount Glovermore — Featuring both “The Woman in Ice” and “The Boobs of Opar”, this is easily the greatest dungeon in D&D history. Multiple return visits to this one, but limited exploration due to the early discovery of a high value / high risk treasure.
• The Tower of Ultimate Evil — You didn’t think the game could get any dumber, but with an elevator that leads directly to challenges that vary in difficulty directly to the floor level, I really would be shocked if the players never went back. They just won’t start at the tenth floor next time.
• The Man in the Mountain — This thing was mentioned once by a gypsy woman and the players still threaten to go there sometime.

Now, reviewing that I have to say that I am not sure I have ever heard of a D&D game where the party ranged around this much. What are the players looking for? Well it’s simple, really. They are looking for the most amount of treasure with the least amount of risk. With the ranger dead, the obvious treasures all taken, and both a six-armed demon woman and a sorceress on the loose, the players are not going to be heading back to Mount Glovermore any time soon!

But where will they go? No telling!

That’s why I’m going to need several adventure areas fleshed out. Multiple one page dungeons in the sewers, the Tower, the Undead Quarter, and then places relatively nearby to Trollopulous.

Utterly insane. And completely unlike the format of any adventure module I have ever seen. Which is of course a clue as to why adventure modules are intrinsically terrible. They don’t solve the problems that people running real D&D campaigns have. They produce a fundamentally different style of play altogether!