Friday 24 January 2020

G: The Shunned Lair

Day Seven: Shun not the cavern, yet proceed carefully.

This cavern stinks - so I'm in a quandary as to whether smells and light sources should be marked on these maps. They can make it very cluttered, but on the other hand they can prove useful. The old Judges Guild dungeon maps made great use of sounds marked on the maps - as per this one here.

When we played Keep on the Borderlands, this lair made mapping unenjoyable. It looked very simple on the map, but describing it to the players was rather tricky and unsatisfying - it distracted us from the atmosphere of playing the actual game. For the Minotaur it went one step further, since I had to give incorrect descriptions to the players to simulate the confusion. This module was my first time DMing in 15 years, and trying to solve this problem over the next year or so lead me to my favoured solution - tracing maps for the players.

Next up is the Bugbear lair - the home of our group's most memorable NPC!

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