What Everybody Knows about the North and the Great Dungeon

Here follows a collection of common knowledge shared by all player characters. Like all common knowledge, not all of it is necessarily true.

• The North is a vast, cold wilderness of craggy shores, deep bogs, dark woods of pine and birch, and looming mountains.
• In ages past, these lands were part of the legendary kingdom of Norumbega, ruled by the elves and their goblin and gnome servants.
• In old Norumbega the elves lingered in gleaming cities made of gold and silver.
• Norumbega fell hundreds of years ago when the goblins revolted against their masters. The elf-halls were destroyed, and elves and gnomes were driven into hiding.
• The great kingdom returned to wilderness filled with monsters.
• Goblins ruled the North after Norumbega fell.
• Nearly two hundred years ago humans from the City States to the south came. These men carved out settlements in the north, scattering the native goblins into the wilderness.
• Nearly a hundred years ago dwarves, frost and fire giants, and human berserkers from the Far Reaches to the east began moving into the North.
• Today descendents of the southern men may rule the coast, but the interior remains wild and unknown.
• Black Lake, the headwater of the Great Gobbo River, sits in the heart of the North.
• In the middle of Black Lake is Delvemont Isle and the Great Dungeon of the North.
• Each year dozens of adventurers, eager to win their fortunes, make the long journey up the Gobbo to the village of Delvetown on the shores of Black Lake.
• Delvetown is a rough and tumble frontier settlement and not entirely safe. It is used as a base camp for all the dungeoneers.
• Delvetown contains armorers and weapon makers, a potion shop, whorehouses, gambling halls, and taverns. Prices tend to be outrageously high due to the remoteness and all the treasure that flows through the town.
• No one knows who built the Dungeon, or how old it is.
• The Dungeon teems with deadly monsters and traps and mysteries, but also the promise of gold and gems and powerful magic.
• The first three levels of the Dungeon are called the Goblin Halls.
• The main entrance to the Dungeon is a big opening, called Culagormac's Porch, which opens into the Gobbo Promenade on the First Level.
• No one knows how big the Dungeon is, exactly. The corridors seem to stretch out forever, and even after all this time dungeoneers are still finding new hidden sections and sublevels and such.
• The deeper down you go in the Dungeon, the more dangerous it becomes. And the stranger it becomes, too.

What is the Great Dungeon?

The Great Dungeon is an unabashedly retro-style megadungeon setting I've been running off-and-on since 2010. I wanted something fun and casual that I could pick up, put down, drop random groups into when needed. It was initially built for D&D 3.5e but pieces were adapted for Swords and Wizardry and the Pathfinder Beginner's Box. In the last couple of years I've been running it for 5e and I'm gradually porting older pieces over to the new system.

I have done past campaigns that tried to emulate one fantasy subgenre or another, but my primary goal for the Great Dungeon was to emulate nothing more or less than classic D&D itself: wild, shaggy, gamist. My primary influences for the setting, in order:

1. OD&D with its emphasis on megadungeon and wilderness adventuring. I wanted the setting to contain anything and everything that could be found in the three LBB, with less reliance on subsequent supplements.
2. Holmes, as a cleaned up and polished expression of OD&D
3. Moldvay/Cook, for being the version nearest and dearest to my heart;
4. AD&D, though I wanted to make it a much smaller influence, with less emphasis on the Great Wheel cosmology and the nine alignments. Focus on the first three core books plus Fiend Folio (which was really an OD&D supplement at heart). No Unearthed Arcana, no drow.
5. Select elements from later editions, if I liked them and felt they fit with that weird OD&D vibe. These are admittedly idiosyncratic decisions. So gnomes and tieflings as PCs, yes. Dragonborn, warforged, no.

Although I never played OD&D, one of the first supplements I bought after the Basic and Expert Moldvay/Cook sets was the Best of the Dragon, Vol I, a compilation of articles from the Strategic Review and the first couple years of the Dragon magazine. The material was all written for OD&D and helped convey a lot of the early game's aesthetic.

In the last six or seven years several bloggers have done a nice job poking at the implied setting behind (below?) D&D, and these inquiries have greatly helped shape my thinking about the Great Dungeon. One of the best series was written by Wayne Rossi at Semper Initiativus Unum, who noted "If you actually read the wilderness description in OD&D volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, it turns out that the implied details of the setting are weird." As a result, I wanted the setting to have a few distinct features:

1. Post-apocalyptic. Jeff Rients might have been one of the first to assert that "Default D&D is post-apocalyptic in nature," but several others such as Hill Cantons drilled down with posts like "What Rough Men Tell Us About AD&D's Implied World."  So the setting of the Great Dungeon is built on a series of older civilizations, with Norumbega being the most significant, but with two more recent calamities resulting in bandits, brigands, and other unsavory fellows lurking in the wild lands. Which brings me to the next point . . .
2. Wilderness. The Outdoor Survival map was really an unofficial OD&D supplement, and hexcrawling through vast, dangerous wilderlands is an important aspect of the game. Delta recently demonstrated how influential Outdoor Survival was on OD&D rules for exploring and movement. In OD&D the wilderness is important not just as an opportunity for adventure but also as a resource for high level adventurers to exploit in order to establish their own freeholds. So it was important to place the Great Dungeon in the North,  a wild and largely unclaimed region.
3. Only Semi-feudal and Quasi-medieval. There are swords and horses,  sure. But the resemblance to medieval Europe is purely superficial, as Blog of Holding recently detailed in "D&D is Anti-Medieval." Class and religion in the North are not the monolithic forces you would find in medieval Europe. Social mobility and travel is common and encouraged. In practice the D&D setting is much closer to the American West of the 19th century than, say, France of the 12th.

I am Haunted by Dungeons

NOT QUITE thirty-five years ago I received a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Basic set, the glorious Moldvay red box with the trippy Erol Otus cover. The game was a birthday present, and it changed everything.

I had devoured the Hobbit, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. At some point I had read a Dynamite article about this crazy D&D game, complete with pictures of little toy figures exploring a maze, with monster lurking around the corners. It looked like the coolest thing ever.

I asked for a copy for Christmas, but instead got a copy of the Dungeon! boardgame, which turned out to be a lot of fun to play, but like a killer appetizer, only whetted my appetite for the main course . . . which arrived a few months later.

I think I took a copy of the game to school, stealing peeks during recess and in between classes. In the weeks and months that followed I spent a lot of time with those exotic dice, graph paper, and notebooks.

While I enjoy a bunch of different games like Traveller or Call of Cthulhu, D&D and its variants have been my mainstay over the years. I am a big fan of the retroclones and the OSR. For the last seven or eight years I have shuttled back and forth between 3.5e, Swords and Wizardry, and Pathfinder. Just recently have started playing around with 5e.

What I want to do with this blog is to try and show how I've using old school elements in my new school game, and how I pull new school elements into my old school game.