Well, Shallown was interested to know how I thought things were so deeply altered, and I love to see myself type, so here's how my entry was not preserved "in tact," as Creamsteak puts it, and I will attempt to do this both in and with tact. (Maybe I blew it already... I guess that's just the way things are going to go.)
The original version was designed as what Gary Gygax called a "trick" in the original DMG. Not every room in an Nth level dungeon should have an Nth-ish level (CR in Newspeak) monster that stands around in the room waiting for PCs to come around, kill it, and take its treasure. Those are good things to have in a dungeon, of course, but there are other things to life and to dungeons.
When I wrote 26, most of the existing rooms were in fact pretty good, like the excellent Scriptorium of the Damned, but they were all definitely forms of ye olde monster room, so I thought "a good Gygaxian trick is the way to go here, break things up a bit."
So what the PCs see when they go in is a big room with a huge ring of yellowish metal (could it be gold?!) suspended over a giant, tentacled violet mushroom. The room is covered with gore and there are strange markings, lines, and geometric shapes all over the floors, walls, and ceiling.
The point to this room is to make the PCs go "What the...?" and try to figure out what's going on here, because certainly any player seeing this thinks "gosh, something this big and weird has to be important!"
The PCs by now certainly know that they're in a demon infested dungeon, and everyone who knows demons - especially old time gamers - knows that demons are always involved in plots to do weird summoning rituals, open gates, etc.
They're probably going to assume that this ring is some kind of gate device being guarded by whatever they think they mushroom is, and they'll possibly think that the markings serve some ritual purpose, and they're certainly going to poke around a lot. In fact, this room is just a game court (which also serves to give the dungeon a little character), so I added some special features related to it, like the magic mouth that shouts "goal" when something goes through the ring (a quasi-trap). I also put an ordinary-ish giant rat in a hole in the corner, plus some benches, just things for PCs to find, which might clue them in about what that place really is. I intentionally made the mushroom just a perfectly ordinary sort of violet fungus, because this room isn't about combat. It's not a dire half-dragon fiendish ghost fungus with 15 levels of Monk. It's just a big funky CR 3 violet fungus that any blind and feebleminded 14th level wizard could beat to death with a spatula, and it's that way because that's not what the PCs expect it to be after running the gauntlet of templates in the rest of the dungeon. It breaks things up a little, and it also might suggest, after they puree it with a hail of 14th level blows, that the thing it seems to be guarding isn't really the Legendary Gate to the 9 Hells or something. A clue.
What happened to this carefully designed and conceived room, which inspired two other contributors to go with the demonic game theme?
One thing, the violet fungus was advanced to make it a little tougher. In itself, this is insignificant, and this was reasonable for Shallown to do, though not really necessary. Second thing, the giant rat was eliminated. Why? Dunno. I guess it's not a big deal.
Third thing, the narrative intro was changed to begin:
This large, high-vaulted room, whatever its original intent, seems to be outfitted for demonic team sports competitions.
Do you guys write murder mysteries by starting with: "The butler did it."?
On top of that, all the doors were changed to iron, including the ones to the locker rooms, and the skeleton key was removed. What was the point of that? Are people going to enjoy the dungeon that much more because it took them an extra round to break down door #36? I intended that skeleton key to be sitting there in the lock, calling to the players: "Oh, it would be so easy... just turn me and open the door, no fuss, no muss." It's something a little different and to make them wonder if it's some kind of a trap or if it's really just a simple key.
As well, the details I put in about the value, weight, composition, and decoration of the extremely valuable brass ring were removed, though I admit in that case it's possible that an earlier version of the room was used, since I added those last. And that's another feature of the room - will they think to "grab the brass ring" (yes, it began with a pun) that's worth 10000 GP? How will they get a 1-ton, 6-foot-wide
objet d'art out of the dungeon?
Oh, but what else does the new and improved intro say?
"In the middle of the of the room, a four-foot diameter brass ring is suspended above a large tentacled mushroom."
I guess PCs know on sight that it's not gold somehow.
I mean, there was a hardly a single thing in it that somebody didn't decide to piss on at some point. Individually, most don't make too much difference, but the whole result of this needlessly aggressive editing is that the room drifted from being a creepily mysterious "trick" room to a really lame EL 5 monster room. I'm not fuming mad or anything, but I'm definitely in the "annoyed" category.
