Quote:The best part of playing old school RPGs is being the Referee/DM/GM.
You are the one who spends all week conspiring to challenge and confound your players.
Drawing maps is a hobby within a hobby and I've been working on a draft for Spiral Keep.
I'm doing all five levels overlapping on two sheets of 11 x 17 T-shirt cardboard - no flipping between pages.
No grids either.
I have found that grids limit my creativity because I want to follow the lines. All my maps in the past decade are grid free.
Although I play tested some of my ideas for this dungeon with the house group, no one has played this version yet.
I will be running this dungeon at Arnecon. It's pretty big and I do not expect the players to explore more than about a 5th of it in a 4 hour session.
Then again, it's a late night session and with enough coffee... ?
I still have 6 seats available for this game at Arnecon. I also always take walk ups.

Quote:Sometimes you just gotta LARP it
Running Spiral Keep at Arnecon.
Things just kept getting more and more verbally complicated in a room with a treasure chest.
I don't use minis when I run my games - it is all in your head.
I also had a lot of players. Maybe as many as 12?
That was when I opted to go live play and I put a chair on its side to represent the treasure chest and my players began to creep down the side of the room to examine it.
They lucked out and the poisoned darts all shot out into the room away from them.
I think they had a lot of fun with this improvisation that just happened in the moment without any planning.