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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8642928" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Exactly.  PUBLISHED megadungeons were rare.  But for at least the first five years or so of the game, the principle instruction on how to run the game was first to design a big dungeon of at least six levels (preferably ten to twelve) with tons of rooms, constantly under construction and development.  Reading the fan literature of the time, we see that the play culture was full of them; from the MIT one(s) to Cal-Tech, to the original Blackmoor and Greyhawk, or Greg Svenson's Lost Dungeon of Tonisborg (the maps of which are stunning).But publishing such a monster is a unique challenge.  As we've learned, Gary's Greyhawk was run out of relatively sketchy notes and minimal room keys for fractions of each level.  The Temple of Elemental Evil megamodule was the first one TSR actually published, but by 1985 TSR's style gave really detailed and verbose keying, which was a bit of an obstacle to actually running the thing.Actually one could argue that Tom Moldvay's The Lost City is the first TSR published dungeon akin to a megadungeon.  It's got something like 10 levels, and connects to a whole underground city (left for the DM to flesh out) if you survive, though the bottom half is kind of sketched out pretty roughly, and the "pyramid then reverse pyramid" structure results in the levels on average not being very big.  But it's still pretty amazing and a great starting point if one were to want to expand on a published module to make a "proper" megadungeon.  The Goodman Games OAR version of it was the first OAR I bought, and they definitely did the expansion and fleshing-out justice.I think what Yora's thinking of in terms of their popularity in the OSR was that because there had never been a really successful publication of a good, runnable megadungeon* actually DOING that.  And figuring out how to present the data for such a big dungeon in a clean, clear, digestible manner became a kind of holy grail in the early OSR.  Stonehell being the first generally-regarded success, but several others following, like Barrowmaze.*At least not from TSR or WotC; arguments could be made for Caverns of Thracia (only 4 levels, but sprawling and with tons of interconnections and multiple entrances), Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor (5 levels), or Dark Tower from Judges' Guild, or, after 2000, Rappen Athuk from Necromancer, or Castle Whiterock from Goodman Games. Though those latter two weren't published until 3rd ed, by which point new gamers had lost memory of the dungeon-crawling procedures that you want for running these sorts of things, and older gamers who still liked procedural dungeon crawls were mostly still sticking with AD&D.Yes, switching from purely Wandering Monsters to more multifaceted Random Encounters is definitely a level up in DMing.  Although the original tables including normally peaceful or Lawful "monsters" like dwarves, gnomes, pixies, pilgrims, acolytes, merchants, or fellow adventuring parties always implied this.Still, especially for wilderness travel I very much like building tables with a lot of explicitly peaceful or potentially friendly fellow-traveler encounters, weird events, or hazards like weather or travel mishaps/damage to gear to provide complications and interest other than hostile monsters.</blockquote>

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