Tags
Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Dwarves, Dyson Mega Delve, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, Maps, Megadungeon, OSR, RPG, Ruins
Once home to 10 mithril statues of the elders of the clans who founded this city, the Mithril hall now appears barren and empty, showing the damage from the destruction of the city gates and cisterns.
Mithril Hall (with grid)
At two places along the 35 foot tall mithril hall stone bridges cross over at a height of 20 feet. The first of these collapsed during a battle here between scavenging groups shortly after the demolition of the gates, but the second remains intact. More importantly one of the great cisterns of the city is reachable through these passages and is only partially collapsed. A trickle of water permeates the old stone here, and the floor of the cistern has been overtaken by a forest of giant fungi.
But the fungi here are different than those in the Mushroom Caves in the distance, for strange intelligence has grown here, and fungal hunters stalk these halls – deadly and poisonous creatures of the dark.
Mithril Hall (no grid)
Both exits from this map lead to the City Gates map. But several other exits can be added to both this map and the City Gates map to expand the dwarven city (typically on later visits into the dungeon when you want to spice things up). I would place a secret magical entrance in the floor of the far end of the Mithril Hall itself that opens to stairs down into many living quarters or lost workshops of the dwarves. And there are definitely larger living areas to the north of the City Gates map that have been cut off by the collapsing of the gates that could be dug out by other forces between visits.
These kinds of changes to the maps as the game progresses is something that I feel is important to a “mega dungeon” experience – not only are the factions within the dungeon not static, but the map itself evolves over time, producing it’s own challenges and secrets.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
it would be interesting to see the halls pre-departure. That is a version of the maps where they are intact. It would be useful for people that may want to have a dwarven delve that is complete.
Agreed, but drawing a 10′ / square map of a city that holds 20-30,000 dwarves is a task that is beyond my attention span at this point.
Long ago in the dim, dusty past, the first of the original Dragonlance modules presented a solution for this. Although the adventure was a supersonic railroad-y mess, I think the idea was sound. They used dungeon geomorphs to fill out vast underground cities.
I believe that the Dwarves of Rockhome Gazetteer for the OD&D campaign setting (Known World — please don’t call it Mystara) used a similar concept, but not so well presented. That tome’s suggestion was that dwarven engineers choose to commit a handful of geomorphs to memory and thus can plan entire cities by deciding what morph/orientation combo would fit best in each area.
I’m betting that you could do something similar with Dyson’s many geomorphs from a few years back. That was the first thought I had when he began drawing them. He’s even got some of the tiles that include fortifications and large, grand hallways. You might have to modify one or two to get the full effect, but there’s not much about the geomorphs in the Dragonlance adventure that Dyson’s don’t do more elegantly.