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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7122113" data-attributes="member: 29398">Actually, it's nothing...well, almost nothing...to do with stories, and more to do with DM-side design.OK, here goes. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Far too many published dungeon adventures - particularly for low-level characrers, as Bone Hill is - fall into one or more design traps. One is chokepoints.  There's only one way in.  Or - far more commonly - there's only one point of access from one level to another.  There's no other way to approach a particular area (ignoring teleport effects, and low-level parties usually don't have these) than to go through the chokepoint.Another is what I call linearity.  Everything eventually comes to a dead end.  The best analogy is going up a river - no matter which forks you take you'll always eventually reach a dead end and have to go back to a previous fork to try something different.  No closed loops.  A2 Slavers Stockade is bad for this - if you dissect the map you'll see that much of it is very linear as written unless you-as-DM add in a few extra doors.  And again this means that barring teleport effects the party will always first approach a given room or encounter from the same direction.  Easy for the DM and the boxed-text writers, not so interesting for the players as it soon becomes obvious you're being funnelled.A linear or heavily-chokepointed dungeon is by design usually going to play out close to the same every time it is run.Now take a look at the dungeon/castle part of Bone Hill.  There's about 5 or 6 ways in to the complex - some hidden, some obvious - directly accessing every level (I think - going by memory here).  Once inside there's several ways to get between the main two levels, and there's closed or close-able loops all over the place both horizontal (on the same level) and vertical (between levels).  The characters have options and choices that matter, and that don't just lead to dead ends all the time.  There's really no chokepoints, and not much linearity.  It's brilliantly done!The result: I've now played through it twice and DMed it twice, with vastly different results each time due to how the party chose to approach it and what choices they made once inside.  To me, that's a sign of a well-designed low-level module.A bigger and maybe even better example of this type of design is the Judges' Guild module Dark Tower.Lan-"it took me ages to realize why I liked Bone Hill so much (its subtly brilliant design); and now when I'm designing a dungeon adventure I look to Bone Hill to see if I'm doing it right"-efan</blockquote>

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