Rob Conley put up a good post about the value of terse dungeon descriptions, referencing my own post from yesterday.
My comments yesterday about the non-publishable nature of Felltower as written might be easy to interpret, though. Here is what I commented on Rob's post:
"To be clear, I'm not saying you can't write a terse but effective and publishable dungeon. I'm saying you can't just grab up notes meant for a GM who is making stuff up on the fly and noting down only what he doesn't want to forget and publish that. Like Castle Greyhawk, if I handed someone else Felltower it would be a mess to try to run. I could publish a terse version, but it would need to be re-written since it's not in any kind of state conducive to other people running it."
Basically, I was talking about my dungeon. Also, I'd note that if I did make Felltower into a publishable dungeon, it would either be a) verbose, or b) run very differently in the hands of someone else. Not that b) is a bad thing, just that it's not the same thing as "really running Felltower" would be.
Felltower. Gaming Ballistic. Let's do lunch. :-)
ReplyDeleteHeh. At this stage, publishing Felltower would be like hearing about a nice dinner I made so you publish my shopping list. It's only slightly more organized or understandable. :)
DeleteI understand your point, however I wasn't advocating that you, Gygax (or anybody) publish one's notes 'as is'. Instead write from the point of view of teaching somebody how you ran the dungeon from your notes. So when somebody sees "C19 Butler's room 100 gp stashed in a dresser drawer" they understand how you extrapolate it for your session.
ReplyDeleteIt would not be unlike teaching critical thinking, but rather teaching the broad picture, the author narrows is focus on Greyhawk, Tegel Manor, or in your case Felltower.
Gotcha. But you don't need a megadungeon to do that - just more accurate sample dungeons and explanations of how you expand on brief notes.
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