Dungeon Runners - The GM

Greetings to those who have decided (for whatever reason) to read this...blog?

I suppose that's the right word for it.

Anyway, greetings. My name is Matt. I am an on-off student from the small welsh city of Swansea. I have been role-playing for nearly 5 years, and 4 of those have been spent GMing various games from different systems. My players have called me every name under the sun, some good, some bad. I have delighted my gamers with simplistic and fun maps, while caused others to tear up their grid paper and cry (poor Nathan). I enjoy designing dungeons for various purposes and scenarios. It's probably the main reason I got into DMing D&D.

This leads to what I'm posting here. About 8 months ago, I picked up an A5 sized book full of graph paper. It was accidental, I wanted a new lined book for campaign ideas. When I saw the pages, I instantly came upon an interesting idea. Several small dungeons, each one designed to fit on one page, and all the information needed to run the dungeon on the back. I felt that this was an idea that could really grow into something that I could share with others. Maybe even compile a collection of my favourite for on-line distribution to those DMs who prefer storyline to dungeoneering.

Imagine my surprise (and slight disappointment) to discover the One Page Dungeon competition that had already finished with a similar idea. Bollocks

So that idea went on the back-burner for some time, but eventually, I decided to try it out anyway.

As with any project, its good to set some ground rules. So here were mine:

• Every dungeon would have a different, one-word theme. (I later decided to award players with XP if they managed to guess the correct word)
• Each dungeon would contain one powerful magic item that was hidden. A bonus to encourage players to explore
• No dungeon would contain hard-stated monsters. This meant that, should I later decide to share my dungeons, they wouldn't be level-constrained, allowing DMs to fill them with monsters adequate for party-level.
• All information required must fit on the 'back' of each page. This would keep the dungeons in a single, small sized book, easy for DMs to carry around

I think the main purpose of my idea was to supply DMs with a hand book filled with quick, one-shot dungeons. To this extent, I try to plan my dungeons so that they could be run completely within a single session of D&D (varies from 3 to 5 hours with my particular playgroup).

After creating my first few dungeons, I decided to run them with a group of players to see how I was progressing. Now, Iv decided to "blog" the results of the dungeons and how the party are progressing. Hopefully, it will be something enjoyable, entertaining, and informative for other DMs

I'm also planning on posting other home-brew ideas for D&D 3.5 and RPing in general.

Enjoy

~Matt