Review 34: Stonehell Dungeon - Down Night-Haunted Halls
It will surprise some of you to learn that I was pretty out of the loop for most of the post 2000s OSR G+ boom. During most of this, I was in college and was either not playing at all or still playing 3.5e D&D, so I missed a lot of the great stuff that came out of this era only to come across it later. One of these is Stonehell Dungeon, written by Michael Curtis (who would later go on to write a shitload of great adventures for Goodman Games). Specifically, this is book one of the collection, covering levels 0-5.
A little bit of a disclaimer on this next one-- I did not run the entirety of the adventure, since it is of course a megadungeon. This is also larger in scope than anything I have written about previously or probably will after the fact, so it's going to be a brief summary focusing on the presentation of the information, which I did in fact find very useful. I ran this using The Black Hack 2nd edition, with some added houserules that essentially added B/X experience thresholds so we could do a "gold for XP" campaign.
Getting it to the Table
Let's face it-- thinking about picking up and running a new megadungeon is intimidating! By its very definition, it is a massive space to wrap your head around, and the good ones have various factions to interact with the PCs and each other, and there are numerous encounter tables to juggle as well as restocking rooms and all the mechanical moving parts that make the classic megadungeon experience really sing.
One aspect of the post-2000s OSR scene that I really love is the efforts of many game creators to focus on making old rules and adventures easier to use by essentially reformatting them with modern layout and organization. Stonehell is an early example of this concept, and honestly it made the difference-- I've got a couple other dungeons of comparable size that I can't imagine running at all, because the information is presented so poorly. Particularly when you're running from a physical book, minimizing the amount of page flipping that you need to do is crucial, especially when it's a big book. Too many times you see a massive tome with a gigantic map, either stuck in the middle of the book or at the end.
Stonehell is flipping huge-- each level is divided into four quarters that typically have different environments or factional presence, and the first book alone has five levels plus the surface area. The way that Michael Curtis managed to make this actually usable was to effectively make a two-page spread of each quarter of a dungeon level. The left hand page has the map of the quarter along with the relevant encounter table for the area, plus any special features or tables that might be needed here (such as the "random crypt contents" for the Quiet Halls on level 1). Then, the entire room key for the quarter is fit onto the right hand page. Because the quarters are pretty large, it is likely that an adventuring party will spend an entire session there, so the GM really only needs to have the book open to that spread, possibly referencing other sections from time to time, but this is literally a game changer. Looking at this layout was what made me say to myself "yes, I can run this!"
The book diverges from this format a little bit at the beginning of each level-- it includes a full level map with all four quarters pieced together so you have a nice overview of the level and how things relate to each other, and then it provides some general details about conditions in this level, such as lighting, doors, and other special considerations you would need when running a dungeon crawl. New monsters are typically included here as well, with the others typically drawn from the standard B/X or retroclone bestiary.
One criticism that I have seen (and partially agree with) about this adventure is that descriptions of keyed areas are necessarily sparse. Because the elimination of page-flipping was paramount, there are definitely certain rooms that are summed up in a single terse sentence. I say that I partially agree with it because I actually love a good terse description-- it leaves plenty of room for the GM to embellish with detail in the way that works best for their game. However, this can be something that is harder to do with something at this scale because you're having to embellish a LOT of rooms and fill in a lot of blanks. It leaves you a nice clean slate to mold the dungeon into your own setting, but if you're thinking about just picking it up and running it, it might feel a little bare.
What Worked?
- Spreads! I really can't say enough about this. It's really a brilliant way to present a dungeon, and it's really cool to see how many products coming after it have refined and further improved the concept.
- Takes the idea of "info where you need it" to the next level. Every section you're running has everything you need to run it.
What Didn't Work?
- Necessarily sparse descriptions. For those who want a richly detailed and evocative picture painted for them, this is not the product! While there is a certain amount of implied worldbuilding (as well as an extensive background and history of the dungeon at the start of the book), at the end of the day it's really just A Dungeon. There are no frills in these classic crawls; you start at the entrance and go through as much as you can, getting as much treasure as you can, and getting out again. But then again, this could easily be in the "What Worked?" section!
Final Thoughts
My Black Hack Stonehell experiment was a fun time, and my players definitely enjoyed the recreation of a true old-school dungeon crawl. It ended not because the dungeon wasn't fun, but rather because I kept butting my head against certain aspects of the Black Hack system-- that's not the topic though. Overall, I've thought about running this again with one of the old retroclones to really give it a fair shot as it was written, but that would be a major undertaking and I've got so many other god damn adventures that I want to run. One thing I have also considered is to just snip out certain levels or quarters that I enjoyed more than others and use them on their own. There's some interesting faction play between the hobgoblins and some other creatures, really ramping up the martial nature of the hobgoblins and creating some deadly choke points and kill boxes in the dungeon environment. All this is to say that I'm happy that I own this and got to run it a bit!
You can get Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls for an astonishingly good price via Lulu print-on-demand. Thanks for reading!