Dungeon Delve Memories From GEN CON 1999 "To paraphrase the Waco Kid, ‘I must have killed more PCs than Cecil B. deMille.’ "I killed a dozen or so with the same encounter -- most of two separate groups met their end at the hands, er, breath of a crippled yellow dragon. "Ah...good times..." --Andy Collins (RPG Editor)

For the Dungeon Master

The Dungeon Delve is a mega-dungeon designed as four separate minicampaigns. Each campaign offers its own quadrant for PCs to explore over several game sessions. Each quadrant has a separate point of entry, so an ambitious DM can be running several parties in different quadrants at the same time. First, download the entire Delve map and descriptions and decide which area you'd like start with. If you'd like a more easily viewed version, just download your chosen quadrant.

We offer characters at several levels. At Gen Con, the 3rd-level characters played on the first two days of the convention (Thursday and Friday), then the 5th-level characters came in on the third day (Saturday). On Sunday, the final day of the con, the 7th-level characters braved the delve. Each room description offers special notes that apply to each day of the convention (or character level). You can choose your party's desired power level and use the notes for the appropriate day--just like we did at Gen Con.

Once you've begun your dungeon crawl, log onto our Dungeon Delve message board and tell us how it's going! What rooms were the most deadly to your party? How far did the PCs get before succumbing to our fiendish creations? Post your best Dungeon Delve memories--from time to time, we'll select some to post here on the website!

Maps

Descriptions

To update the 2nd Edition D&D monsters from the Mostrous Manual for use with these characters, simply reverse their AC up, using 10 as the baseline. For instance, an AC of 10 remains 10, but a 2nd Edition AC 9 becomes AC 11 for monsters in the Dungeon Delve.

The special missions run at GenCon '99 were separate from the dungeon delve, and served as a special reward for enthusiastic players. They were prety much on the fly stuff created by our team of Dungeon Masters.

Forget about needing the keycode: just play the doors straight up as Saturday and Sunday doors, with a clock but without a keypad. That is, they become operable at 12:00 noon on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

So whatever session you set as your "Saturday" and your "Sunday" sessions, those doors become operable at the begining of that session.

Here is an example how to convey this information to your players: Leave a dusty old note somewhere in the dungeon for your players about the mysterious timing devices on certain doors in the dungeon and their correlation to phases of the moon or days of the week

Characters

Note that the Dungeon Delve characters provided vary a little from 2nd Edition D&D rules. The main differences involve the Armor Class and the attack bonus. The provided characters' ACs run from 10 upward -- the higher the better. Thus, AC 10 is the same as ever, but 11 represents someone with a shield, 12 is someone in leather armor, etc.

The attack bonus (this replaces THAC0) is also a simple "+n" value. The "+n" is the number you add to your d20 roll on an attack. If the result of the d20 roll plus your attack bonus is equal to or above your foe's AC, you hit, and inflict damage normally. For instance, the fighter might have an attack bonus of +7. His foe, an ogre, might have an AC of 16. The fighter rolls a d20, and gets an 8; 8+7=15, so he misses the ogre. Had he rolled 1 or more better on the d20, he would have hit and inflicted damage.

All Files

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