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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9505265" data-attributes="member: 7045072">My own reading of the impact of this style is that A) it represents a break with and adaption of the style of dungeon design suggested in the LBBs.  B) The OSR, as it often did, interpreted, perhaps over interpreted, these sparse clues and the claims, memories, fabrications, and desires that both its members and original sources on the first few years of play put forth.  However they did it in a very interesting way that I suspect varies a fair bit with the actual first campaigns and their dungeons. I call this OSR interpretation the "Mythic Underworld", and because I can't actually ascribe it to Gygax, Gold, or Arneson - really none of the people who were producing stuff in the 1970's, I tend to see it as a product of the OSR.  Starting with Philotomy's musing on through the various OSR Megadungeons (even my beloved fave ASE, but not Arden Vul perhaps - that's a magnificently and disfunctionally huge Jaquaysian Ruin for me) and ultimately coming to rest in the "Depthcrawl" which randomizes dungeon creation during play.ADDED: Now what might Greyhawk and Blackmoor castles have actually played like?  I don't really know, but the impression I get, mostly from reading "First Fantasy Campaign", play reports in "Alarums & Excursion", and "Temple of the Frog" is that they had a lot more larger scale/skirmish style combat involved.  Yes there was sneaking and exploration of dungeon corridors and random encounters with Sir Fang ... but the antagonists were often big warbands of humanoids, and the players were expected to combat them with alliances, fireball spam, or big bands of their own mercenaries and retainers. This may just be my own impression, and I can't really say it's true - which goes back to the first point.  I tend to think of Barrier Peaks as the work of someone else, and I was recently informed that Lost Caverns was also heavily influenced by another designer.  This is something that makes talking about Gygax hard. Now Barrier Peaks is a big dungeon, and messily so, but Lost Caverns, while it has plenty of passageways, doesn't have that many keys in the passage themselves - 44 or something like that 42?   It's also a higher level adventure so those distances matter less with continual light, magic glowing weapons and create food and water largely eliding the supply issues that are part of making long passages a threat.  Lost Caverns somewhat uniquely for Gygax (see the claim - and one I'm not sure to what degree I believe - that it was ghostwritten by Kuntz, much like Barrier Peaks.) has no wandering monsters in the published version.  Essentially the tunnels exist as annoyance only - the party can stroll about as much as they want, much like a 5E adventure ... this is a fundamental problem with mid/high level dungeon crawling where the supply issue is covered by character tools and combat tends to be a conflict of spells, saving throws and magic items - meaning wanderers are either so tough they push the party out of the dungeon or so weak they aren't even a speedbump.Lost Caverns rather deserves it's own discussion, but it strikes me as outside the Gygax "raid adventure" canon to a degree.B1 - also an interesting choice - both the map and teaching aspect seem to point to that pre-TSR/OD&D style design, at the time of publication almost a throwback to the past even...Absolutely agreed - part of the reason I wrote the blog post was to look at the TSR era of design and point out how it worked really well for a specific scenario - one I enjoyed playing in the 80's, but one that I don't generally see a lot of OSR or POSR attention going towards. I do think that by real contemporary standards - either the scene based 5E dungeon or the POSR/ultralight densely interactive 5-10 room one B2 is a big dungeon, even if it's not a big adventure. It's far less dense then most modern stuff - regardless of play style.Thanks for the post Mannahnin - this is the kind of discussion of old games I miss.</blockquote>

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