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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rob Kuntz" data-source="post: 8247437" data-attributes="member: 7015759">The Dungeon Crawl works best if you design it yourself; otherwise I find that "isolated" designs of the type such as my Bottle City, Garden of the Plantmaster, Beyond the Living Room, etc. are good for inclusion and use in pre-existing campaigns as they can be inserted anywhere without intruding much on the base structure of a personally crafted area and its history.  So less backgrounding is needed with this approach while a little shoe-horning suffices.  All three named above are actually huge, detailed set-pieces in one sense, as is Cairn of the Skeleton King where you adventure in a Royal Tomb complex to kill a King who has been necro'd back to un-life.This is also why Castle Greyhawk, as designed by Gary and myself, may or may not have worked for some or others.  It was built to playtest the rules so it grew fast (we had to playtest/view (in order to describe) level progression and alignment, the latter being one of the reasons I turned Robilar evil, as an aside).  So Cs Greyhawk was thinly described in places, although P. Stormberg (Curator of the Gygax Estate as well as my estate) claims that my levels/areas were more detailed, although by today's standards they would be considered skeletal.  This seminal view of personal use (wherein much was contained in our heads and/or was expanded upon as areas were engaged) worked for us and our players but not for a movement to mass use products.  Fortunately I had (intuitively) ascertained that constructing a dungeon in this manner allowed for isolated areas to manifest (how could they not?) and thus started deigning thematic set pieces (Machine level, Boreal Level, Bottle City,Horsing Around (huge Grecian Mythos) et al); in fact Gary's and my last unfinished  level (we usually did levels separately) is a thematic set piece we contrived for Dragons, a huge affair in our conception.So is there a rhyme or reason here?  That two mad wizards would construct such an  edifice to test outlier adventurers for their own morbid amusements? Not really.  It is a construct to cover for the need to playtest the game then; and out of which parts could be mined and put into a more "appropriate" context, as far as "appropriate" has any relation with the fantastic.</blockquote>

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