I haven’t had a chance to run it yet, but I really enjoyed reading Doom of the Savage Kings by Harley Stroh. The dungeon itself is pretty straightforward, but the adventure surrounding it has a lot of room for interesting interactions.
Favorite OSR Dungeons
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The original TSR module I6: Ravenloft for AD&D is one for the ages. It’s 35 years old, and nearly perfect.
While I hesitate to recommend a Lamentations of the Flame Princess product, I really do like Blood in the Chocolate.
If you’re looking for a full campaign setting/adventure path, Frog God Games’ Razor Coast for Swords & Wizardry is also pretty great. It even has notes to integrate it with Green Ronin’s Freeport: City of Adventure campaign setting.
I’d only heard of it because of the “Fear of a Black Dragon” review, and I haven’t yet actually run it, but I also really like Something Stinks in Stilton.
You’d need to do some converting, but Paizo has produced a TON of adventures for Pathfinder over the years that have a real OSR feel. I’d recommend Burnt Offerings. It’s one of my favorite modules of all time. (While it’s part 1 of a 6-part series, it stands perfectly well by itself.)
And, along those lines, WotC’s D&D 3.0 module The Sunless Citadel is a true modern classic!
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@RichardRuane I’m curious why you think this is. Is it linearity? Or the exploration of a space with scattered obstacles to overcome?
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Both Dunnsmouth and SUD are in contained spaces, and both have organicially constrained movement (having hiked in both swampy areas and in dunes, both will punish you for moving off-trail). Neither is a hex-crawl, and Dunnsmouth doesn’t tend to run like a city/town stop-over. Placing Dunnsmouth in an asteroid field required almost no adaptation. Making Dunnsmouth a place people regularly visit for normal city/town reasons would be a substantial change. So yeah, I think it’s that both (as well as Spinetooth) are very much crawly explorations of a space that is more like a constrained, indoor space than a hexcrawly outdoor space.
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Lost City doesn’t get nearly the love it deserves.
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It’s probably impossible to love The Lost City too much. It’s up there with Caverns of Thracia as an underappreciated classic.
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Spire of Iron and Crystal by Matt Finch is a blast. The fact that players can climb over walls if they’re willing to risk damage makes it really stand out
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I always have a good time with sailors on the starless sea. Anything procedural also has a huge plus from me: gardens of Ynn or stygian library or seclusium of orphone…
One that everyone says is good but I’ve literally never seen or read an actual play of is Veins of the Earth.
Veins of the Earth isn’t a dungeon at all.
The first half is a bestiary, and the second half is an OSR rules-expansion for running underground campaigns, including a very interesting method of procedurally generating cave systems.
Hey man I can’t DM you, but just so you know, when you say “it’s not a dungeon at all” but then describe the book as being about underground campaign ideas, procedurally generated cave systems, and a bestiary, I hear pendantry and unnecessary correction. Hooks, rooms, and monsters make a “dungeon” you know? It makes me feel like I need to be defensive. I know you don’t mean anything wrong by it but thought you should know how that came off to me, buddy.
Have you heard anyone use veins in play? Preferably as an actual play or report somewhere I can consume it?
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Yeah, Veins of the Earth feels like the Ulysses of the OSR.
I’d love to see/hear some applications, as well.
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A friend of mine ran through Deep Carbon Observatory and then moved on into about a dozen sessions of Veins of the Earth. It went well, lots of crazy underworld shenanigans.
Also there is this: https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2019/03/osr-veinscrawl-session-13-14-15-16-17.html
Veins might not be for everyone, but it’s certainly playable.
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It might be too far to say Veins isn’t a dungeon “at all,” but if you hand it to someone expecting something more or less ready to use like Caverns of Thracia or Stonehell, they’d probably be a little disappointed.
Unfortunately, the only way I’ve used it thus far is to drop some of the monsters into a more traditional dungeon.
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Sure… But OP didn’t ask for something that was “ready to use.” They asked what people’s favorite OSR Dungeons were. I’d assume that the people making the replies get to say whether something qualifies as a “favorite dungeon” to them, right?
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I have no interest in telling anyone what is or isn’t a dungeon.
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I’ve used Tomb of the Iron God for “oh crap, I need a dungeon” on a number of occasions. It’s a fairly straightforward entry-level dungeon that’s easy to run. I also had a great, though incomplete, run of Throne of the Toad King, which is the first part of Demonspore, also by Matt Finch.
That said, I’ve been trying to steer clear of Frog God Games stuff lately, so will be keeping an eye out here for new dungeons to start familiarizing myself with.
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EricVulgaris wrote…
Hey man I can’t DM you, but just so you know, when you say “it’s not a dungeon at all” but then describe the book as being about underground campaign ideas, procedurally generated cave systems, and a bestiary, I hear pendantry and unnecessary correction. Hooks, rooms, and monsters make a “dungeon” you know? It makes me feel like I need to be defensive. I know you don’t mean anything wrong by it but thought you should know how that came off to me, buddy.
Sorry, man. No offense intended!
I had been working on the assumption that we were talking about pre-generated dungeons with pre-written encounter areas (i.e. modules). I wanted to make sure you realized that Veins of the Earth wasn’t that at all. I know people who bought a copy on reputation alone and were sorely disappointed with it!
While I love this book so much that I purchased it in hardcopy a few years ago, I have not actually ever used it in play. Back when I was playing more trad games, I had ideas of using the procedural cavern generation system to create a very weird system of caverns for my party of adventurers to explore…
It still hasn’t happened.
The most use I’ve gotten out if it in actual play was the derro write-up in the bestiary section during a Pathfinder adventure. It totally creeped out my players!
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I love Dwimmermount but it needs to be slimmed down quite a bit.