Welcome back to Dungeons of Yesteryear!
When you were a kid, did you have a binder full of D&D maps that you drew yourself? And ruled paper with dungeon keys, that in retrospect may not adhere to any sensible rules of dungeon ecology?
Yeah, you weren’t the only one. Us, too.
In Dungeons of Yesteryear, we open up our own notebooks and show you some of OUR old dungeons. We’re hoping they conjure up as many good memories for you as they do for us. Let’s compare notes on dungeon keys, encounter choice, and, of course, whether that demon lord just hangs out in area 2-2 waiting until adventurers wander by for a light snack.
Fans of Dungeon Crawl Classics certainly know the name — and art — of Stefan Poag. Ever wonder what the fledgling work of a great fantasy artist looks like? Ever think how cool it would be to have someone with mad pencil skills onboard for your own campaign? Well, Stefan caught the golden age fantasy RPG bug like the rest of us, and flexed his imaginative muscles in a flurry of graph paper mapping back in the grand old days of adventure.
That’s just level one of The Mines of Khunmar, Stefan’s megadungeon project that combined a whole slew of his existing dungeons together into one big Mines of Moria style deepdelve. It even has a Balrog living in the basement!
Love the iconography on this one, adventurers can stumble upon webs, gems, rubble, and not one but three varieties of skeletal remains! Proper dungeon!
Perhaps one day Mines of Khunmar will be a fully-fleshed out release (complete with Stefan Poag artwork!), but until such a glorious day, fans may content themselves with a free PDF digest version put together in 2004. It currently has a dozen main levels and three times as many sub-levels. Stefan describes this version as “still, honestly, pretty much a 1000 room hotel for monsters.” Now that’s my kind of hotel.
“I must have been a weird kid who spent his days and nights at home drawing dungeons and populating them.” And we’re all the better for it, Stefan!
Do YOU have a Dungeon of Yesteryear that you’d like to share? If so, we’d love to see it. Please send it to us at info@goodman-games.com. Perhaps your trip down memory lane will take you right into a Dungeon of Yesteryear.
