Your best dungeon crawl?

[hunter1828]

Module B1: In Search of the Unknown for purely nostalgiac reasons. It was the first dungeon I ever ran way back in '78 and I've used it several times again. Classic crawl that is plenty customizable so it's different every time.

hunter1828

 

[nameless]

As a player, I was a half-dragon monk, level 6 or so total, which meant that I had 3 levels and none too many hit points, nor especially good saves and skills and such. I was playing in a solo game, and I was in a dungeon looking for a dragon who might know where my father lived.

Towards the entrance of the dungeon, I spotted a rotting corpse that was impaled against the wall. Not having any skill with finding or disarming traps, I instead deduced that he stepped on some sort of trap and paid for it. I spider climbed over the vicinity of the corpse and continued. The place seemed empty, until I saw a troll sleeping in the hall. Long story short, I wasn't able to sneak past it, and it woke up and started chasing me. I knew that I had zero chance to kill a troll by myself, since I was a pretty poor fighter with low AC and hit points, let alone the fact that my only fire was my breath weapon. The only thing I had was a good base speed. So I ran my little behind back to the area with the trap, and made a leap to the place that I knew was safe. The dumb troll followed me, walked straight into a VERY lethal spear trap, and I used my ready action to breathe on him and get him negative, whereupon I lit a torch and coup de grace'd him.

I was awfully proud to beat that thing using just my wits.

 

[Arnwyn]

There's a *lot*, but my players and I have fond memories of a set of multi-leveled caves beneath an island that was once the lair of ancient pirates. The PCs had to navigate down through the hideout to the myriad of caves even further beneath, to get down to the lowest level to find the water tunnel leading out to the ocean bottom where a sunken pirate ship rested... rumored to hold an intelligent cutlass.

The shivering of the PCs (both literally and figuratively) when they were polling their beat-up raft through the dark, fast-moving currents of the deep water-filled tunnels was pretty fantastic.

 

[blackshirt5]

I haven't run them yet, but I think that ALL of the dungeons from my upcoming campaign "Isles of Adventure", especially the namesake dungeon "Castle Zelyon" are gonna be my favorites; I've got old castles, ancient temples, ruined cities in the middle of deserts, and many more.

 

[alsih2o]

way back, mabe 84-85, i took a map of the cattletsburg refinery, and my knowledge of the site, and ran it as a huge encampment of orcs, goblins and ettins (i had a real thing for ettins) that had been hit by a meteor.

i had a large number of the dead still around and the living had been unable to escape too far frm thescene for days because of the magnetism of the meteor (i was young, there was magic, it entertained me).

so these maddaned wounded burned critters were popping out of empty giant tanks, perched on antennae towers, and fortified in wells and block abuildings.

there was no real reason to be there except to kill baddies, but we had a ball with it.

we frequently did d+d in ruinous holocaust environs at the time mostly because my dad scored me lots of free maps of industrial sites and they spurred my imagination....

 

[Ruined]

Back when all we cared about were dungeons, killings things, and loot, we were huge fans of the Temple of Elemental Evil. I swear we ran through it multiple times over the high school years.

Playing it now on PC, I'm reminiscing about all the little things. And realizing: man, it didn't seem this hard back then...

 

[demiurge1138]

The one I had the most fun running was a trip into the Kobold mines in the homebrew reptilians-only campaign I'm running. After a few just-to-spook encounters with manes (those little pathetic demons), the party found an abandonded salt mine, occupied by some mephits, crystalline gargoyles and a guardian dragon named Scally (scalamagdrion from MoF). Then they found the cloaker temple.

That was the most fun I've ever had running a dungeon. Exploding mushroom traps, a river of poison, an ettercap ambush site (the party made an alliance with the ettercaps and gave them the bodies of their enemies in exchange for a safe place to sleep) and a final battle taking place over an 80-foot deep ravine. Good times.

Demiurge out.

 

[PowerWordDumb]

I remember having a ton of fun with the module B4: Lost City way back in the day.

Of course I had substantially less fun with it in university when a DM in whose game we were playing ran us through it, but denied to the ends of the earth that it was a module, claiming he'd written it himself from scratch.

Uh huh. Yep. Funny how I knew where all the traps were and how to play politics with the mask-wearing underground dwellers, all in an adventure he supposedly came up with on his own. This was one of the prototypically arrogant "I don't use modules, I invent my world myself" loudmouths who loved nothing better than to bash people who paid for prepackaged content.

At one point later in the campaign when presented with a copy of B4, he had the temerity to suggest that TSR had somehow ripped him off, rather than just admit to plagiarism. A week or so later he killed off our entire party to be rid of us and move on to a new group of suckers.

 

[Schmoe]

I had to think about this for a while, but only because my mind had completely blanked and I forgot about the OD&D module B7, Rahasia. Without a doubt, Rahasia was the dungeon crawl that was the most fun for me. I've run it three separate times now, and every time the group has had a blast. It has a good layout, a good premise for the dungeon crawl, fantastic creatures, and a good mix of puzzles, role-play, and old-fashioned monster bashing. If you aren't familiar with it, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Another great dungeon crawl was the I-series module (3 or 4, I think), Pharoah. The last of that trilogy, The Lost Tomb of Martek, looked really cool as well, but I never had the opportunity to play it.

 

[Altalazar]

Greyhawk Ruins - I ran it, and it was quite fun for all involved - the ultimate, huge, deep, strange dungeon crawl. Gotta love those dozen or so richly detailed, multicolored maps of each tower.