I love Tomb of the Serpent Kings. What are your favorites?
Favorite OSR Dungeons
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Not favorite, but one I really want to play: The Lapis Observatory. The design of the book is great and looks super easy to run at the table. Also, weird drug-fueled orange disco elf goo? Yes, please!
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I haven’t played heaps of them - but have run through Sailors on a Starless Sea a few times. Gets epic reeeal quick 
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Wow, sold. QB always delivers.
Yeah, sailors on the starless sea is rad. I tried running Through Ultan’s Door and had a mixed experience. Will be trying it again soon at Dreamation.
I still want to play around with Maze of the Blue Medusa at some point.
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Do Trilemma maps count as OSR dungeons if they’re system agnostic? Well, those are what I like to use for OSR games, anyway.
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My favorite is Deep Carbon Observatory (Maze of the Blue Medusa and Tomb of the Serpent King are pretty high on the list too)
I’d say they do.
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I haven’t done a lot of straight-up dungeon crawling, but I like the sort of emergent point-crawl that Jason’s Labyrinth move can produce, especially as seen in Fowler’s Doolhoven. I kinda want to cut straight to the juicy bits.
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I don’t know that move (or which Jason lol). Is it embedded in Doolhoven? Where do I get Doolhoven?
@xaithegamer it’s @jasoncordova’s move. You can find it on Discern Realities 16, https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/discern-realities/episode-16. You can also find it here written out (for a short while G+ still exists), https://plus.google.com/+AviWaksberg/posts/4ref4tkfx7R.
I’ve also copied out the text from the Discern Realities episode as Jason dictates it here:
When you attempt to navigate Vlad’s Palace, describe how you do it and roll +STAT. On a 12+ you hold two, on a 10+ you hold one, on a 7-9 you also hold one but you also encounter a guardian, on a miss you just encounter a guardian, and on a 1-3 you also loose all your hold. To find one of Vlad’s treasures, spend one hold and describe the room it is found in. You may spend three hold, at any time, to find the entrance to Vlad’s inner sanctum.
There have been many slight variations such as porting it to a different setting, or making it more generic. But this is the version found on the podcast.
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Thanks, @yoshi! That’s a really great system. I’ll have to think about that some more, it seems like a lot of fun.
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I’ll be honest: Doolhoven is the first DW dungeon I have felt like I could wrap my head around. The version of the Labyrinth move in there really clicks for me.
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The full text of the move and a fair number of alternate versions: https://twitter.com/GauntletRPG/status/1089946161161617408
That said. Maybe this could/should be it’s own convo? Since this is specific for OSR dungeons.
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Some favorites:
- Tomb of the Iron God
- Anomalous Subsurface Environment (1 & 2)
- Stonehell Dungeon
- Lesserton & Mor
- The Wizardarium of Calabraxis
- Many Gates of the Gann
- Frozen in Time
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Sailors on a Starless Sea is great so I have to second that.
I’ve found a lot of people dislike it but I really like In Search of the Unknown and would like to use it to kick off a campaign at some point. It’s weird, I love the bromance between Roghan and Zelligar, and I love how straightforward it is.
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Into the The Demon Idol was the adventure that clued me into the OSR and RetroClone with it’s bookmark of stats for different systems like S&W, LL & DCC. It’s weirdness and call out to the old AD&D player handbook still make it a favorite.
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I keep coming back to The Stygian Library, The Lost City, The Price of Evil, and the City State temples. And, of course, Caverns of Thracia.
While several of my favorite adventure settings are outdoors or in towns, I think many of them are essentially dungeons in the ways they play out: City State of the Invincible Overlord, Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Scenic Dunnsmouth, and Spinetooth Oasis.
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Oooh. So Lapis. So gold.
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One I recently enjoyed reading was Crypts of Indormancy by Ezra Claverie from Melsonian. It’s an interesting balance between terse OSR efficiency and occasional needless extravagance. Maybe “balance” is the wrong word – both elements are present in ways that are sometimes impressive and sometimes frustrating.
I don’t know if it’s a favourite per se – perhaps I should say that I enjoyed reading it and I think about it when I think about making dungeons weird. At a purely reading level, I always value that; perhaps I will think differently when I run it.
Also the binding is really nice.
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