Miniature Monday

Misc. links (megadungeons and game design)

According to naraoia at The Mule Abides, "the OSR’s love affair with the megadungeon seems to be over." Stephan Poag of Aldeboran adds: "After a brief period of recently being 'in vogue' among the cognicenti of the OSR community, it seems as though the 'megadungeon' may be once again falling out of favor."

So megadungeons aren't fun now? Hmph. Where is this discussion happening?

Daniel Cook is a video game designer. Check out his posts on building tight game systems, loops and arcs, and arrow of play.

UPDATE: Joseph Browning of Sorcergy & Super Science also posted on the megadungeon kerfuffle, which looks less like some popular turn of sentiment against megadungeons, and more like Joe The Lawyer not finding the first level of Dimmermound cinematic enough for his tastes. Ahem.

Miniature Monday

The greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself

The always interesting Smithsonian Past Imperfect blog offers up a nice little D&D-ish story of ancient myth and amateur archeology:

But only when the men went deeper into the hillside did the greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself. There, hidden at the bottom of a much steeper passage, and behind a second S-bend that prevented anyone approaching from seeing it until the final moment, ran an underground stream. A small “landing stage” projected out into the sulfurous waters, which ran from left to right across the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in places it approached boiling point.

Index of Dragon articles

The Acaeum wiki has a useful listing of Dragon issues and articles. I'll probably spend a bit of time in the coming weeks with my CD-ROM collection and the Best of Dragon index.

Go First dice

Behold the Go First dice, which are fair four-way initiative dice that never result in a tie. They're 12-siders numbered:

Die 1: 1, 8, 11, 14, 19, 22, 27, 30, 35, 38, 41, 48
Die 2: 2, 7, 10, 15, 18, 23, 26, 31, 34, 39, 42, 47
Die 3: 3, 6, 12, 13, 17, 24, 25, 32, 36, 37, 43, 46
Die 4: 4, 5, 9, 16, 20, 21, 28, 29, 33, 40, 44, 45

Neat. The dice are for sale now.

It looks like the same guy has a dice die:

Miniature Monday