Stonehell Dungeon - Down Night-Haunted Halls

Put simply, this is the product that I always dreamed about as a kid playing Dungeons and Dragons. I remember being both inspired and intimidated by the Ruins of Undermountain boxed set, with its huge and mostly empty maps. I wanted a giant dungeon of similar scale, but one that was fully keyed and ready for me to run. Stonehell Dungeon is exactly that, a truly giant dungeon (more than 700 rooms!) that manages to provide an easy to use minimalist key for every location. For only $13, I would have to say it is one of the greatest bargains you will ever see in a role playing game.

The most impressive part of Stonehell Dungeon is its organization. By any reckoning, publishing a dungeon of this size is a mammoth undertaking. Michael Curtis manages to pack an amazing amount of information into 138 pages and yet keeps it easy to digest and use. Each level of the dungeon is divided into four quadrants, with a master map of the level showing all four quadrants together and then each quadrant getting its own keyed map.

At the beginning of each level is a list with brief statistics (using Labyrinth Lord conventions) of each monster to be found in the level, as well as an overview of the level noting its general theme and any special features. Any new monsters, magical items or spells to be found in the level (and there are more than 40 new monsters and many new items and spells) are also described in this overview. Then each quadrant map is presented along with a room key. The room descriptions are brief and to the point, consisting of a sentence or two describing the furnishings, smells, occupants and treasures to be found in the room.




In most cases, each quadrant of a level is self-contained, with only a few entrances and exits to the rest of the level. This modularity makes it easy to use sections of Stonehell by simply removing a quadrant and placing it in an existing dungeon. You could create a much smaller dungeon by mixing and matching some of your favorite sections of Stonehell. The room descriptions are sparse but contain enough information to run as is, without providing so much interconnected detail that it would be difficult to modify the dungeon to fit an existing campaign setting. This approach was inspired by the One Page Dungeon, a template for creating a dungeon map and a key all on a single sheet of paper. Stonehell had its genesis on Curtis' blog, The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope, as a series of one page dungeon posts detailing sections of the dungeon.

Stonehell Dungeon is a campaign in a book. It hearkens back to the earliest days of the hobby, when Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz took parties of adventurers through session after session in the dungeons beneath Castle Greyhawk. The levels are many and varied, tied together by the story of Stonehell’s development as a prison (its twisting halls were originally dug out by the prisoners themselves who formed factions and constructed strongholds deep under the earth), the subsequent waves of intruders that have modified the original prison and by a hidden entity that warps the very fabric of reality and attracts foul creatures and adventurers alike to the dungeon. This back story has enabled Curtis to include everything from an underground greenhouse level filled with deadly plant monsters to a mad wizard’s laboratory to hidden temples dedicated to forgotten evils to an entire sublevel that exists outside of normal space and time!


Stonehell is compatible with Labyrinth Lord and other older editions of D&D and their retro-clones, but could certainly serve as inspiration and source material for anyone wishing to run a dungeon in any fantasy role playing game. No less a personage than Mike Mearls, one of the lead designers for D&D 4e, recently advocated for using an old school approach to dungeon construction in 4e adventures. He notes that (in older editions of D&D),

“There are no skills to roll, just descriptions of what a character tries to do. When you pull those things back, you’re left with only one option for making a dungeon or adventure interesting: Compelling locations, mysteries, puzzles, weird phenomena, *stuff* that the PCs can poke, prod, and inspect. These are all the things that make D&D compelling.”

Author Michael Curtis agreed to give an interview for this article:

Carl Nash [CN]: Stonehell Dungeon has been an inspiration for me, both in terms of its ingenuity and its amazingly concise layout. Can you say a few words about the One Page Dungeon and to what extent that philosophy guided your work?

Michael Curtis [MC]: The reason that the One Page Dungeon idea captivated me from the start is that it operates on the premise that the game master is a creative individual who doesn’t need (or want) every last bit of the dungeon explained in painstaking detail. By leaving most of the canvas blank, the game master has the freedom to view the dungeon through his own imaginative lens and to turn the locale into a place that reflects the wants and desires of both himself and his players for role-playing adventure. If you were to put Stonehell Dungeon into the hands of five different game masters, you’d get five very different dungeons in terms of tone, set dressing, and monster reactions and tactics—which was my hope from the onset of the project.

CN: There was some talk last year among various blog authors in the old school movement about whether or not it was even possible to publish a true megadungeon. What does "megadungeon" mean to you and do you think you have succeeded in presenting one with Stonehell Dungeon?

MC: The whole "Can you publish a megadungeon?" thing burbled to the surface about a month before I was set to publish Stonehell Dungeon, so the book inadvertently became my "Exhibit A” that you can indeed put a megadungeon between the covers of a book and release it into the wild. To me, an adventuring site needs to be several things in order to be a megadungeon. First, it needs to be big. If one level of the dungeon fits on a single piece of graph paper, it’s too small no matter how many subsequent levels you have beneath it. Buy an 11” x 17” inch tablet of graph paper and get busy. Second, it needs variety—the crazier the better. The dungeon is one of the few times you can get away with the completely illogical, so revel in it. The players should never know what awaits them at the bottom of those newly-found stairs. Lastly, it needs to be the campaign world in microcosm. As the players explore the dungeon, they should encounter details that relate the world above. Old temples, ancient statues, lost magic, weird artifacts, and the like that require the characters to seek out sages and historians for answers make the campaign world much richer. Without those elements, you’ve just got a bunch of loosely connected rooms in the dirt.
As to whether I feel that I successfully presented a megadungeon with Stonehell Dungeon, my answer is of course going to be “yes,” but I realize that this is only according to my personal criteria. Everyone has their own tastes when it comes to what a megadungeon is, and what works for me not might work for someone else. It is gratifying, however, to see that enough people have bought and praised Stonehell to make me think that it meets more people’s expectations for a megadungeon than not.



CN: Can you reveal any tantalizing tidbits that might await in the as yet unpublished deep levels of Stonehell Dungeon? Do you have a possible release date in mind for the lower levels?

MC: I was pretty obvious with clues to what lurks deeper in the dungeon in the first book. If you read over the upper levels you’ll see hints that there’s a vampire lord, a bizarre machine, a shimmering orb, a casino, more Vrilya, nightmare places were reality is breaking down, a magic-user’s brain in a golem, and the Big Bad Boss of the dungeon waiting in the second book. One place that doesn’t get mentioned is a section that I’m tentatively calling the Astronaut’s Tomb. It’s been on the list since the early days of the dungeon’s construction and I hope that people either absolutely love it or completely hate it once they see it for themselves.
As for when the second book will be available, the first book taught me never to speak in absolutes when it comes to release dates. The first book took ten months to complete, but I’m hoping for a slightly shorter time frame for the second now that I know what I’m doing. My plan is start writing Book II in March with an eye on releasing it before year’s end. That’s a far as I’m willing to go with a release date.

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Stonehell has compelling locations, puzzles and weird phenomena in abundance. I personally have already lifted an entire quadrant of the dungeon (the greenhouse level) and inserted it into my Mutant Future campaign; the fact that I could use such a large section of a dungeon in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi game speaks volumes about the diversity and creativity to be found within Stonehell.

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