I'm surprised I haven't shown these before now. They're from my mid-teen years; late 80's. Somewhere I came across poster-board sized graph paper and about a week later this dungeon was done. I then glued it onto an actual poster-board. Surprisingly, 30 years on and it's still in pretty good shape.
I never wrote it up as a dungeon. Making 169 rooms interesting is a challenge now, let alone then -- I've never been a huge fan of empty rooms. One curious thing, you can go from room 2 all the way to room 154 and only pass through 3 other rooms. An unplanned feature for sure.
And then of course there's this bad-lad, four times the size. Too bad I burned out. It's much more dense than the one above and would have clocked in at around 800 rooms. These sheets are in surprisingly good shape too.
They're now artifacts that make me want to put aside what I'm working on and attempt to draw the largest, most complex dungeon of all time. Probably not gonna do that. Besides, how would you scan such a thing?
I loved the concept of the Dungeon. Still do. Always will.
Just saying.
Both are cool looking maps, must have taken a long while - even the uncompleted one. Does Room# 2 and 154 connect via long hallway (with three rooms in between)?
ReplyDeleteArtists with larger drawings and paintings are able to scan their works, so I assume you'd be able to scan one of those, as well. Maybe you just need a giant scanner or scan it in sections, I don't know.
Thanks! I wish the pic was bigger when you clicked on it, but there is a route you can take starting at room 2 and arriving at room 154, sticking to the corridors as much as possible, and only pass through 3 rooms in between. These 3 rooms are on the first half of the journey.
DeleteNo doubt you could have something professionally scanned if you really had to.
I like them in an abstract art sense. There is a certain irony in that single tilted room, like suddenly happening on a functioning Abrams tank in a deep feudal game setting. "What is that thing doing here?" And of course, it would be tremendously easy to get lost in there, with all the square rooms.
ReplyDeleteMy dungeons never reached this size, even if I loved the first Undermountain box.
I know, that room does stand out and then there are a couple of rooms with beds, one with pillars and an alter, a handful of statues, it's as if I started dressing it and then said, "nope." They're definitely more maze-like than functional complexes, would've have been a challenge to run had I wrote it up.
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