A Year in Stonehell Dungeon

I've served a lot of time imprisoned in Stonehell Dungeon's subterranean corridors. The last nine months of my stint was as Dungeon Master. Before I started running it, I was thrice a player at different tables, the first of which was also my first OSR experience ever. I've now ran it as an open-table game for twenty five sessions.

I've served my time in Stonehell Dungeon.

People ask me how well I like Stonhell Dungeon. They also ask about my experience running an open-table. Perhaps someday I'll make a post about game mastering for an ever-changing pool of thirty players (so far), but this post is mainly about Stonehell.

However, running it as an open-table dungeon has a profound influence on my opinion. It colors my every sentiment, both good and bad. 

There's a lot of both; good and bad. 

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I chose from between three ways to start my campaign. In order of my personal preference back then: Keep on the Borderlands, Barrowmaze, and Stonehell. So, Stonehell was my third choice. 

I tried the Keep first. Its dungeon, the Caves of Chaos, was just a tad too vanilla and too simple for my taste. If Gygax had at least given names and a line of description to his characters in the town and castle—or even just the most important ones—it would probably be our campaign's home base today. Alas, he did not. 

Barrowmaze was a little too verbose for me to disseminate before my attention span faltered. Right or wrong, I felt like I had to read it all to run it, and I just didn't want to invest that much time and effort. Not back then, starting my first OSR campaign, anyway.

With Stonehell, I didn't feel I had to read anything to run even the first session of it. At the same time, I knew I could run it drunk, sleepy, and distracted—not uncommon states of mind for an evening beer-and-pretzels game over the Internet. That level of ease of use at the table is hard to beat.

I wanted something simpler than Barrowmaze, but not so simple as KotB. Stonehell struck that perfect balance. It was just right. 

But it wasn't just right for running as an open-table game.

Treasure was way too "feast or famine." To mitigate some of that, I used a "silver standard" (1 sp = 1 xp; book prices in silver), effectively multiplying all treasure's value by ten. I also wrote a +1 weapon into practically every haul. Beyond that, I added a lot, no different than every DM's review of Stonehell I've ever read. 

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The core issue I have with Stonehell Dungeon as an open table is that there isn't enough bait to entice players to explore the levels. 

Without deviation, players—myself included—were compelled to go deeper rather broader lacking any good reason not to do so. Stronger monsters as gatekeepers doesn't cut it; even the most inexperienced dungeon crawler expects the risk to increase with the reward as one goes lower in the dungeon. 

I can say both as a player and as a DM, it's my opinion that the dungeon is not well designed for a straight-down approach, and I don't mean because of challenge. 

The experience is rather bland. Take the stairs from 1A to 2A and there's not even much of a scenery change. Same with 3A. It doesn't feel like you're delving deeper. Monsters get a little harder, but like I say, that's just not enough on its own to do it.

Since it wasn't designed with enough bait on the hook to get players to explore levels horizontally before descending, it should have been better designed vertically. Delving to lower levels should have been more mysterious, or threatening, or . . . something. 

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From my perspective as a player, and from what I've learned running Stonehell, Barrowmaze does a far better job for an open-table game. I've played about five sessions in Justin Hamilton's Sunday night Barrowmaze campaign on the OSR Pick-Up Games Discord server. 

I could immediately tell I chose poorly when I picked Stonehell over it. 

It has several "barrows," each that serve as a mini-dungeon. Explore the overworld a little, breach a barrow, plunder its gave goods, maybe solve a puzzle or whatever, then go home. End of session. 

That is an ideal setup for an open-table. You hit all your bases almost every game with few lulls of exploration "filler" sessions between scores. Perfect!

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What does this mean for my current Stonehell campaign?

If you can't tell, I'm dissatisfied with Stonehell for an open-table campaign, so let me come right out and say it. It's an amazing masterpiece, wonderfully written, easy to use at the table, and filled with a ton of fun and interesting things for players . . . but it's ill suited for our campaign. I've had a ton of fun game-mastering Stonehell Dungeon, but I'm ready to move on to something different. 

As a year-end review of our campaign, let's get it out of the way first: out of twenty five plus sessions shared by about thirty players, three were pretty bad. One of those was really terrible: the night we got lost exploring on the second level, but nothing really exciting happened. Blech!

By far and wide margin, most nights were "pretty good." You know, nights where everyone had fun and shared some laughs and we were glad we all played. Good times. 

However, six or seven sessions were truly epic. They were the type of session I can say, "This is why I play D&D."

• Ingrid the Dragon Slayer losing her arm in the battle against the giant undead cobra, the heroics to save her, and the tragic death of our campaign's first dwarf just steps from the exit. 
• Keri the Kingslayer earning his title while fighting beside his comrades against the orc chief and his tribe. 
• The intense battle with the water weird in the enchanted fountain that no one ever revisited the whole rest of the campaign. 
• The existential room where the doll was first discovered and later encounters with it. 
• The rise and fall of the party's alliance with the Neanderthals and all the bloodshed it caused. 
• The heartbreak of the "TPK minus one." The slow, agonizing death of every PC and hireling while ascending the stairs to the exit . . . with the greatest treasure trove ever plundered from Stonehell in their grasp. Ouch. 
• The ire of the medusa Lachesis and the illusions of her sorcerer. The courage the party showed when defying both. The victory of their first clash. The vengeance they won. 
• Storming the barbican in a wild, full-frontal assault. Not only surviving, but taking it. All the courage, wit, and luck that epic feat required.

I'm terrified I'm going to forget someone, but off the top of my head, I can recall very fondly characters played by Erika, CC, Josie, RandomWizard, Rosencrantz, King, KingPenta, Pralec, StarBorneHero, Lukas, Graytung, directsun, Modest Mace, and Ragnar. That's only fourteen, so I'm sure I've left someone out! Sorry! Remind me!

Overall, it's been a fantastic campaign. I've had so much fun, so little stress, and met so many great players who, through time, I've learned are interesting people I'm very glad to know. 

The good news is, most of the complements I've heard my players give Stonehell are archetypal features of any good megadungeon. The aspects of our campaign to which they seem most attached can be transplanted seamlessly as we move forward. 

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It's my hope The Undercrypt will be a fun, interesting and challenging multi-level dungeon designed specifically to be played as an open table. That means having several challenges that can be resolved in a single session.

I've been saying it for a few weeks now, but I'm still writing town, which for us will take the shape of the Keep on the Borderlands.

Stonehell will remain in our campaign world. It will physically replace the Caves of Chaos for which it shares a striking geographic resemblance.

The Undercrypt will be located on the same overworld map in the area designed for DM use, the Cave of the Unknown. 

Players can choose where they want to go on a session-by-session basis. 

I hope to see many returning faces after our month-long hiatus. I'm also excited to meet many more new people in the year 2021!

Looking forward to playing again soon! 

— Richard "Stripe" Sharpe