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BECMI, BECMI D&D, Dungeon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Frank Mentzer, Maps, OD&D, OSR, RPG
In a series of posts about running D&D games in public, Frank Mentzer (of BECMI D&D fame, and with a lot of other D&D credits to his name) discussed the importance of having a “generic” dungeon ready to run and shared the one he has used 30+ times to date.
The Mentzer Dungeon
And he was cool with me redrawing the dungeon. The floor plan is established, and he has a general knowledge of what is in each branch of the dungeon, but final decisions are made on the fly during the game session so each session is catered to the players and time constraints of the event.
I won’t be reproducing his discussion on what is in each area, but here is the map he uses (above) and a player version of the map (below) for players to map their way through the dungeon as they explore it.
The Mentzer Dungeon (Player Start)
The maps on Dyson’s Dodecahedron are released for free personal use thanks to the support of awesome patrons like you over on Patreon. Every month 400 patrons come together to make these releases possible. You can help too in order to keep the flow of maps coming and to improve their quality – and even get a map of your own!
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
I have several that I use for this purpose. Wererat’s Well, Tomb of the Iron God, The Lichway, Swords Against Chaos: The Crimson Curse, Tower of Xenopus, Tales of the Laughing Dragon, and Tomb of the Serpent Kings.
This one looks interesting.
Oh, hey, he ran that dungeon for me at a con a few years back; it was a Fleetwood Mac-themed goblin dungeon, IIRC.
It would be awesome to turn to your players at a con and say, “Okay, what kind of dungeon you want?” and combine the ideas thrown out to run it on the fly.
“Okay, we’ve got a steampunk dungeon with plane-hopping smurfs!”
“Fleetwood Mac” … I’m listening…
The boss fight was a pig demon named Tusk; to defeat him, you had to break the chain….
This is similar to his adventure in the red box
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This is great. I’ve had a couple of times over the years where there was a need to come up with an adventure on short notice. Usually I’d grab an encounter from a published module I knew (like the opening battle of WG4 Tharizdun). But having a blank dungeon like this would be handy too.
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
Is there a link to the original posts? Would like to read it.
Same here.
Anyone know where we can find this?
I spent at least half an hour searching for it, but didn’t find it.
Pretty sure I’ve played in that dungeon, great to see it realised ‘Dyson Style’!
Mentzer is great! If I have to run something spur-of-the-moment I usually improvise like crazy, and nowadays if I want to I can grab a random map off the internet to work from. We have it easier today.
In case anyone’s interested, the Frank Mentzer’s blog posts can be found on Facebook here:
Part I – Logistics
Part II – The Characters
Part III – A Simple Dungeon
Part IV – Summary
I love how you included a starter player map here.
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