I have been DMing for about 8 years now, but I have always ran more sandbox or non-linear style campaigns, with a few linear one-shots scattered in there. I am about to start running Frog God’s 5e conversion of Tegel Manor for my group, but I am a little nervous about the differences in running an old school crawl. Do people have any tips? My biggest concerns are:
- How will any improvisations I make snowball? I like sandboxes because I can respond on the fly, but that seems harder in a crawl when the spatial/temporal relationships of things is so rigidly defined.
- How much should I bother reading ahead? When I ran more prewritten modules, I would spend a long while researching the quests, dungeons, and the world, but that seems like a waste of time when I have no clue where the players might go when there are a million room options.
- How do I keep track of everything? Rooms they have been to, how long since they have been there, named enemies they have killed, etc?
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Unless there’s a reason for a rigid layout, you’re free to piece the rooms together as you see fit. Say rooms ABCDEFGH are in that order, but only A D and H have to happen in that order, you can always do AGBDFCEH, for example.
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Just read enough so you know how to react on the fly.
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Errr, I don’t get this question, same way you’ve been keeping track of events in your own adventures?
- I guess I just want to avoid making the whole thing a continuity spaghetti when improvising.
- Yeah, I think it will be less reading ahead and more reading the current and immediately adjacent rooms description summaries. I like knowing all the puzzle pieces, but Tegel Manor has 240 rooms, that is just a little much.
- Like I said just now, the Manor has 240 rooms. It is less “What was that NPC’s name and what is his shop called?” and more of “In this giant web of interconnecting spaces, exactly which route did the players take, how long ago did they clear each room, and what secrets in each did they find/not find?” @ftl suggested I keep a copy of my own DM map that I can draw and take notes on, which I really like.
As GM, you have the power to run it as you see fit, this includes modifying the adventure to have less rooms, more rooms, rooms in different order, etc. I think mostly if you’re worried about staying “true” to the adventure as written, well, don’t. What’s important is that the group is having fun.
On point 3 I’d say every GM should have some method of keeping notes, whether the campaign is small or large. Find a system that works for you.
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Even in a dungeon crawl, you can improvise a lot. The contents of the rooms, spells and secrete doors, treasures. I don’t know that specific dungeon, but I’ve never had a D&D game, including a dungeon crawl, where everything went as the module planned.
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It’s useful to read ahead if you can, the you can seed hints of things elsewhere in the dungeon.
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A DM-only copy of the map is really useful, so you can make any notes you want on it. Paired with the list of rooms and what’s in them - that’s where I’d note down for myself what the players did in each room, if there was anything interesting not note down besides “cleared”.
Thank you, I will definitely have to make sure I have my own map printout haha. I am so used to just remembering the broad strokes and jotting down a few npc names and locations in my game that the thought of a whole 240 room labyrinth was a bit much.
When I was running prewritten modules, I was playing online using Foundry, so I could just make all the dungeons by hand and the fog of war would take care of the exploration, plus the dungeons were way less complicated.
Oh, wow. 240 rooms is a lot. Are they at least spread over multiple levels?
Yeah, there is the main floor, sections with 2nd/3rd floors, and then levels of dungeon beneath.
Edit** here is a pic of the old map included with the original release in the 70’s
OK Yeah, I’d probably keep that map as a digital file, and put big Xs on it when the PCs have cleared a room. I’d probably keep a separate doc with the rooms the PCs have visited, listed out with any notes about what happened there.
Since there’s a detailed map, I’d probably never change around the layout of the rooms, that would just be annoying to keep track of. However, I’d feel free to change what’s in them in terms of treasure and enemies, depending on what made sense at the time. Note that in the doc as you go.
If you’re feeling ambitious or are familiar with an image editing program, you could have a PC version of the map, which you send them after each session, removing the fog of war from the parts they haven’t explored yet. They probably need to see the map that they’ve already explored, to stay oriented.
I probably would read ahead for the ring of rooms nearest where the PCs are. They can always take a totally different tack, but might as well be prepared for the most likely one.
Okay, yeah, I think that is gonna be the way to go. Maybe I could also process the map as an adobe pdf and add comments on each room about when they cleared it, what they found in it, etc. I also have some experience with photoshop, though I might have to pick up some illustrator skills to best do the fog of war edits.
Depending on how much work I am willing to put in, I actually have access to a massive plotter printer for posters/banners through my work, so I am kind of inclined to make a big poster that we can stick to the wall and I can add removable covers with poster tack to each room that they haven’t visited to show their progression in real time. My friend who is hosting the games actually asked about putting my homebrew worldmap up on the wall as a poster, so this might be a better, more artistic piece to put up instead (the map I shared is the old one, the 5e conversion map is actually quite nice looking, I just didn’t share it for non-pirating reasons).
I also have tried to make a game progress tracker using chat gpt, but I run up against the token limit pretty quickly, so a living google doc might be the way to go to keep track of things. Thanks for your suggestions!
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