The one page dungeon sheet. The frikking single page dungeon sheet !!!
I know this is probably old news to everyone, but bear with me, I'm a bit slow getting going on this whole online D&D revolution. I found a copy of this baby online (I think the creater's blog is gone. Bummer !), and it's Just Great. Seriously, I've been running dungeons since 1975 and this is one thing I wish I could teleport back there. So many reasons....well, one is that I had gotten to the no graph paper dungeon design stage, but I still laboriously described (and wrote out) all kindsa crap. which looking back at one lousy level (which had four small handwriting pages of notes and keys for the map) was almost all stuff I would have come up with spur of the moment. Lordy, with it all on one page, I could have avoided those hellish "ooooh-ummmmm....errr" moments shuffling papers to kill the mood and momentum; and the hand cramp and eyestrain from all the endless handwriting (look it up younglings)
Forcing myself to stick to the one sheet for all details on the level -including the map, really, really makes me cut back to the minimum I need to run the level, and not just read the level. Plus, I make the dungeon levels more concise and smaller, which is better (gives the players a bit of a boost to actually clean out a level , even if its one of three 1/3 size sublevels) and the random encounters (if needed) are similalry much more conscise, and tailored to the immediate area. And, I never discover that I'm missing page three when the players get to room 62......
Since this is my blog, I freely and hypocritically blame prebuilt dungeons by TSR (and everyone else) for that style.
Geeze, I could go on and on. IT IS EXCELLENT. I think I'll clebrate the release of Beta version Adventurer by writing some kind of old school pulpy dungeon for it.......
...stay tuned.
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