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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8190140" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I have been running a fairly casual dungeon-centric game since last March, inspired by Dyson Logos' "mini-megadungeon" Dyson's Delve (available complete and free on his website, stocked for B/X) and specifically by the Wandering DMs' excellent liveplay videos from 2019 of their play through the bottom half of the dungeon.  In keeping with Paul's approach, I put the Delve in/under Bone Hill, of Len Lakofka's classic module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, replacing the dungeon from the original but keeping the town and local area map, which makes a lovely little local area sandbox.In the course of running this game I've had two separate small groups of players delving this same dungeon at the same time, as well as striking off into some (relatively short) overland travel and into several smaller dungeons I've placed in the area.  Tomb of the Serpent Kings was my first additional hook for the second, less-experienced group of players, and they jumped on that rather than heading to Bone Hill. So they had gained a bit of experience before joining the others in exploring Dyson's Delve.I've also used Dyson's free mini dungeon Goblin Gully, his Burial Mound of Esur the Red, James V. West's Crypt of the Worm Idol, The Secret of Skyhorn Lighthouse, The Flayed King, and most recently a map of Dyson's for a small island fort that I've repurposed and stocked myself.  I've expanded on and re-stocked some stuff, but I've mostly adapted published materials, much of it free.I had been excited by the idea of running a pretty straightforward dungeoncrawling game with this concept for a while, and pandemic lockdown gave me the impetus.  I found the idea of converting my more open-world, greater improvisation existing 5E game to Roll20 or another VTT too intimidating a prospect at first, but this project represented a better way to learn Roll20 using a more limited scope of game.  Upload the dungeon maps, the town and local area maps, find/make some tokens, and boom.I mostly stocked my dungeons with tokens and so forth a level or two ahead of the PCs.  I did a bunch of prep up front, and then most weeks needed minimal additional prep.  Some needed a bunch, as the PCs found a lead on a new dungeon or something, but often I'd have everything all set up for multiple sessions.I've been running this as an explicitly old-school game, using Five Torches Deep on the player side and mashing it up with B/X on the DM side and for dungeon exploration procedures.  Treasure for XP, using the 5TD xp chart but using normal B/X treasure.  I gave higher XP for monsters, taking a cue from OD&D and Wandering DMs.  I halved the OD&D baseline award of 100xp/HD, and then I make adjustments as I see fit to monsters based on special abilities or vulnerabilities.  This has been nice as a consolation when the players run into some trouble but don't make a big score on a session.I also use Jeff Rients' Carousing rules.  PCs can go carouse like Fafhrd and the Mouser once between delves; spend d6x100 SP (I'm using a silver standard, so this is the equivalent of GP in B/X), gain that much XP.  Then take a DC11 Con or Cha check (Jeff Rients uses Save vs. Poison) or I roll on a random table for some trouble or complication, or sometimes something lucky to happen.  Jeff also suggests allowing the PCs to gamble more in bigger towns, but as I've been keeping the action local, I let them gamble bigger as they gain in levels, representing knowing more people, having better connections, etc.  At 3rd level they can choose to roll a d8 instead, at 5th they can carouse with a d10 if they want. Using this system the PCs have generally taken an average of around 4 sessions per level.  Sometimes a bit less if they get a lucky score or are a new 1st level PC joining up with higher level friends who are delving richer areas than they'd want to risk with just a crew of fellow 1st levelers. I think the pace of 3-4 sessions per level has been pretty great, with I think the highest PC having just hit 7th despite having been energy drained at one point.  5TD only goes to 9th level, so the game has a limited lifespan at this pace, but it's felt good both for me and the players.I've been very pleased with Dyson's Delve as a tentpole dungeon, being large enough for fun exploration (having a couple of sub-levels and alternate routes to lower levels), but small enough that the players can make meaningful progress on it and even explore a whole level in a single session if they're moving fast.</blockquote>

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