2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Twenty-One

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary!

Continuing with Part Four of our look at Running Castle Blackmoor over at The Alexandrian Blog. Today we will look at Part 6 of that series "The Dungeon Key."

The Dungeon Key.

First off I will let you know that he provides in his post:

There are four versions of the key available for download as Microsoft Word files:
Blank Template – Glendower Template – Seed 1 – Seed 2
COLLECTED ZIP FILE

You can download them individually or as the full zip file and the links currently work.

He says:

In order to make full use of this material, you’ll need copies of the Blackmoor Dungeon maps. The maps from the First Fantasy Campaign are ideal, but those from Zeitgeist Games’ Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor are adequate, despite introducing a number of new errors. (The most notable of which was that the cartographer didn’t understand how Arneson indicated secret doors on his maps, so missed several of them and turned the rest into normal doors.) The Zeitgeist Games release does have the advantage of currently being available on DriveThruRPG.

And yes, his link to the items on DriveThruRPG are working links. He also comments that the procedures he is going to show you will work on any dungeon, especially mega-dungeons and also homebrewed dungeons.

The next section is titled "The Keys" and this is where he discusses each of those four files that he made availabe for download. 

He describes Arnesons system thusly:

As I described in Reactions OD&D: The Arnesonian Dungeon, I found this particular format fascinating because the combination of treasure + protection point budget creates a specific tactical “shape” for the dungeon, but allows the GM to completely reinvent the dungeon on-the-fly each time they run it:

Under "Seed 2" he says:

Perhaps the most notable take-away, in my opinion, is how the same stocking procedure can create radically different versions of the same dungeon.

That seems to me to make it a system well worth digging into.

At the end he gives you his "Observations from Stocking."  He mentions odd results starting about Dungeon level 5 and some different ways of handling or interpreting that. 

After this he has a section on "Using Minimalist Keys in Play."

An excellent read, lots of good advice and a sense that Arnesons lower dungeon levels were brutal.

Tomorrow we go on to the next section "Restocking the Dungeon."