Tags
B/X, Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, In Search of the Unknown, Kudos, Maps, OSR, RPG, TSR
I’ve talked before about how much of a fan I am of the classic adventure In Search of the Unknown.
But there are times when the convoluted and bizarre map just doesn’t work the way I want for a game. As it stands, the potential exists that a lot of the game time can be spent exploring the hallways of the adventure instead of the far more interesting rooms that those corridors lead to. It also includes a LOT of areas where the walls a “a pencil stroke thick” (or as I generally play them, 1″ thick masonry walls).
Generally I’m cool with the original map because it encourages exploration play and you can make various areas of the dungeon feel isolated from each other (like the throne room on the lower right which certainly feels like it’s own “sector” of the dungeon.)
But a thread over on Dragonsfoot turned me on to this alternate map for the upper level of the dungeon. It keeps all the numbered rooms from the original, but cleans up the design to make it more consistent and also a lot easier to explore. I’m not sure I like the throne room being right as you walk into the main intersection, but it makes sense in it’s own way.
Quasqueton Upper Level (Alternate)
I’ve printed it off and put it inside my copy of B1 in case I want to pull it out with a different floorplan for a faster exploration experience.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
I have run this adventure dozens of times. Like you I am a fan and I treat it as my go to adventure for new groups.
This new map is really nice. I am going to have to give it a try sometime.
That’s awesome! I like it a lot. Alas, I’ve got my kids half way through it already… i can’t change the map now. Drat.
By the way, i used two of your maps for mini-ventures for the boys on the way to Quasqueton. You posted an unkeyed tower and some river caves right when i needed them. So, thanks for that.
Thanks, I like this map a lot! I have always thought that map was an odd choice for an introductory adventure. My daughters have been exploring Quasqueton and I have had to help them with the map a lot.
I have written up actual game play logs for them over at my Castle Triskelion blog, but my younger daughter, now age 9, wants to move on from there, and they haven’t even got to the lower level yet. Of course, their party is all level 1 types so they would probably die if they did.
Whenever I run into the “pencil-thin” walls in a module like this, I’ve always made them 1-foot-thick stone. That only takes a foot off the width of the corridors (making your typical dungeon hallway 9 feet wide), which isn’t exactly something people would notice. If you make the entire dungeon this way — so that ‘exterior’ walls are dressed with the same foot-thick blocks — it keeps everything consistent.
When I’m transcribing a map into Sketchup (usually in preparation for making it 3D), I just copy the map as-is, then offset all the walls by 6″. You get foot-thick interior walls, and everything looks right.
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