How To Design A Bad Dungeon

If you're looking to design a bad dungeon, you can take a few pointers from Dave Hargrave.  His most salient advice?  Secret doors.  Lots and lots of secret doors. 

Dave Hargrave designed four adventures for use with his Arduin Grimoire game system.  The first adventure, entitled "Caliban", was designed for 8th+ level characters.  Caliban is purported to be a ageless, self-aware, malign tower formerly lost to time and space and now revealed once more, for your looting pleasure. 

Caliban's adventure maps provide few hints of a towered structure.  Instead, Hargrave fills each dungeon map-page to the border with odd-sized rooms and interminable secret doors. 

The front and back covers are by one of my otherwise favorite Arduin illustrators, Brad Schenck.  The front cover is not one of his best efforts.

Brad Schenck's back cover is better, though still not stellar, by any stretch of the imagination.

Treasure: Living Scroll, Hell Hand, Demon Ring, Idol of Doom
Skeleton Key, Dragon Horn, Silver Cat's Garb, Black Belana's Garb

This adventure is accompanied by two sheets of cards, one containing treasures and the other one containing new monsters.

Monsters:  Death Tree, Kraken, Wardroid, Warwheel
Dragon Wurm, Phoenix, Death Hydra, Quetzocoatl

The artwork on both card sheets is by Greg Espinoza.

Holmes vs. Hargrave

Early Arduin game materials are rightfully viewed as hacks of Dungeons and Dragons, and The Arduin Adventure boxed set is no exception. 

Similarities between The Arduin Adventure, David Hargrave's foray into the boxed introductory rpg set market, and the earlier-published J. Eric Holmes Dungeons and Dragons boxed set abound.

Beyond the obvious, with both being boxed sets, both role playing games include a basic rule book, provide a "complete" set of rules designed for low-level play, dice, and an introductory adventure.  Each rule book cover also features a Dragon confronted by a pair of adventurers.

The Arduin Adventure rule book is 64 pages, while the Holmes blue book is only 48, but The Arduin Adventure does not really provide an additional 16 pages of content,as it includes (within its covers) a 9-page introductory adventure, The Forgotten Tower of Kharkorum the Black. 

By comparison, the Holmes basic set booklet includes a 5-page Tower of Zenopus adventure, and modules B1 or B2 as stand-alone products.

The back cover of The Arduin Adventure, complete with an Illustration of The Forgotten Tower of Kharkorum the Black

Arduin Adventure is not a particularly well-constructed rpg rule set.  Then again, neither is the Holmes blue book.  The difference, of course, is 3 years.  The Holmes blue book was published in 1977, while The Arduin Adventure was published in 1980.  You would have expected that the intervening three years would have provided time for Hargrave to fine-tune his own competing offering.

This post is not intended review The Arduin Adventure rules themselves.  If you want to read a rather unflattering review of The Arduin Adventure rules, you can find that here.  No, the purpose of this post is to highlight the art of Arduin Adventure.

If David Trampier, Tom Wham and Dave Sutherland defined the visual style, and therefore "feel", of Holmes Basic DnD, then Greg Espinoza, Brad Schenck, Michio Okamura and Roland Brown do the same for The Arduin Adventure.

Greg Espinoza supplies the Unicorn and Pegasus illustrations found early in the rule book.  These are competent fantasy illustrations, although not true rpg illustrations, as they fail to reveal any particular feature of role-playing.

Brad Schenck does a better job, providing the cover illustration to The Arduin Adventure, and two tableaus featuring the various classes and races.

If you consider several other Brad Schenck illustrations, appearing in various Arduin products, you will see that he understands rpg illustration.  His art pieces reveal the environment within which the characters operate, whether it be preparing to enter a dungeon, a surprise encounter with a monster, or looting a treasure hoard after a battle.

Michio Okamura also provides several illustrations, like the Dwarf, above, wielding a combined morningstar/battleaxe weapon, and the hobbit, below, finishing off a dragon.

It's unclear who provides the illustration, below, although it appears to be an Espinoza piece.

I'm guessing that the illustration of a combat, below, is by Roland Brown, as it very different from the Schenck, Espinoza and Okimura styles.

The battle between this Dragon and an adventuring party is my favorite illustration from The Arduin Adventure.  You poor bastards: you poor, flaming bastards.

Late edit: And just so there is no ambiguity ... skeletons are included.



Old School Monsters: Manticore

Here is another illustration from the Arduin Grimoire, this one by Bradley W. Schenck, otherwise know as Morno back in the day. This illustration, of the dreaded Manticore surprising an adventuring party in the depths of Skull Tower, appears on the back cover of Welcome To Skull Tower, the second Arduin rulebook. It is one of 14 black & white illustrations that appear in this book. I love the look on the face of the thief, wielding his dagger and a set of keys, as the Manticore leaps over him, knocking down the axe-armed Dwarf.

The 1977 AD&D Monster Manual describes the Manticore as possessing a tail of iron spikes, which are volleyed at its opponents prior to combat. The above, alternate Arduin Manticore, has a scorpion's tail, which I find far more interesting (and deadly). I also prefer this illustration to the one by Sutherland in the Monster Manual: both are black & white, yet the in medi res nature of this combat scene adds far more tension and excitement to the monster illustration.

Which brings me to another thing I love about the old approach to role-playing fantasy art: the use of multiple artists, and art styles, allowed for a heterogeneous depiction of adventurers, scenes, and monsters. That encouraged a flowering of imagination. My scorpion-tailed Manticore was just as permissible as your iron-spike-tailed version.