this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Any advice for running my first real Dungeon Crawl? (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have been DMing for about 8 years now, but I have always ran more sandbox or non-linear style campaigns, with a few linear one-shots scattered in there. I am about to start running Frog God's 5e conversion of Tegel Manor for my group, but I am a little nervous about the differences in running an old school crawl. Do people have any tips? My biggest concerns are:

  1. How will any improvisations I make snowball? I like sandboxes because I can respond on the fly, but that seems harder in a crawl when the spatial/temporal relationships of things is so rigidly defined.
  2. How much should I bother reading ahead? When I ran more prewritten modules, I would spend a long while researching the quests, dungeons, and the world, but that seems like a waste of time when I have no clue where the players might go when there are a million room options.
  3. How do I keep track of everything? Rooms they have been to, how long since they have been there, named enemies they have killed, etc?
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

  1. Unless there's a reason for a rigid layout, you're free to piece the rooms together as you see fit. Say rooms ABCDEFGH are in that order, but only A D and H have to happen in that order, you can always do AGBDFCEH, for example.

  2. Just read enough so you know how to react on the fly.

  3. Errr, I don't get this question, same way you've been keeping track of events in your own adventures?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. I guess I just want to avoid making the whole thing a continuity spaghetti when improvising.
  2. Yeah, I think it will be less reading ahead and more reading the current and immediately adjacent rooms description summaries. I like knowing all the puzzle pieces, but Tegel Manor has 240 rooms, that is just a little much.
  3. Like I said just now, the Manor has 240 rooms. It is less "What was that NPC's name and what is his shop called?" and more of "In this giant web of interconnecting spaces, exactly which route did the players take, how long ago did they clear each room, and what secrets in each did they find/not find?" @ftl suggested I keep a copy of my own DM map that I can draw and take notes on, which I really like.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As GM, you have the power to run it as you see fit, this includes modifying the adventure to have less rooms, more rooms, rooms in different order, etc. I think mostly if you're worried about staying "true" to the adventure as written, well, don't. What's important is that the group is having fun.

On point 3 I'd say every GM should have some method of keeping notes, whether the campaign is small or large. Find a system that works for you.