WORST Dungeons of All Time?

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Gringnr

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What are the absolute WORST dungeons ever commercially published? And why?

I'll start with Nightmare Maze of Jigresh, published by Judges Guild for Empire of the Petal Throne. I mean, just look at this shit:

jigresh.jpg

That's not an amoeba, that's the map. The accompanying text isn't too bad, but why would.you ever subject your players (or yourself) to such a map? How much fun could countless hours of pointless, repetitive movement and mapping be? With a scale that seems to indicate that the party will need to be in a single file line for, say, 98% of the adventure? And a Wandering Monster table with 6 one-time encounters, so the marching through tight corridors will be broken up only by more marching through tight corridors?

Ah, who am I kidding? This thing sucks!
 
When I saw the title of the thread, this was the first dungeon that came to mind. I doubt that any dungeon is close to that in the bad-factor. Of course, the title of the dungeon does sort of hint at it's nature.
 
Anything from 1970s TSR; anything by Gygax, ever.

Bear with me here. The first dungeon I got to know well was “The Halls of Tizun Thane” by Albie Fiore published in White Dwarf 18. The first megadungeon I owned was Dark Tower by Jaquays for Judges Guild. In the light of those R.E. Howard infused classics the TSR stuff just seemed inane. Tournament dungeons: what the hell were they thinking?

As Peterson, Grognardia and J JoeNuttall have shown the imaginative frontier of the 1970s lay far from Lake Geneva.
 
What are the absolute WORST dungeons ever commercially published? And why?

I'll start with Nightmare Maze of Jigresh, published by Judges Guild for Empire of the Petal Throne. I mean, just look at this shit:

View attachment 58478

That's not an amoeba, that's the map. The accompanying text isn't too bad, but why would.you ever subject your players (or yourself) to such a map? How much fun could countless hours of pointless, repetitive movement and mapping be? With a scale that seems to indicate that the party will need to be in a single file line for, say, 98% of the adventure? And a Wandering Monster table with 6 one-time encounters, so the marching through tight corridors will be broken up only by more marching through tight corridors?

Ah, who am I kidding? This thing sucks!
Hehe!

I get what you're saying . . . but it seems to me that it actually would not be all that hard for a GM and/or players to handle in various ways that would not involve the actual player experience needing to be long or boring. "We follow the left-hand wall" for example. Though of course, if they DID manage to get lost in there, well, LOL.
 
I'd handle the OP dungeon in a somewhat abstract way with a series of rolls to get from one major location to another and just use that to determine how much time was lost exploring into dead ends.

Eventually you're going to arrive somewhere.

The issue is just using the conventional dungeon approach in this situation. The wrong tool for the job.

That said, it's the job of the module writer to solve this problem.
 
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And the stairs seem too normal and orderly. Maybe it is to lure trespassers into thinking this was going to a walk in the park.
 
What are the absolute WORST dungeons ever commercially published? And why?

I'll start with Nightmare Maze of Jigresh, published by Judges Guild for Empire of the Petal Throne. I mean, just look at this shit:

View attachment 58478

That's not an amoeba, that's the map. The accompanying text isn't too bad, but why would.you ever subject your players (or yourself) to such a map? How much fun could countless hours of pointless, repetitive movement and mapping be? With a scale that seems to indicate that the party will need to be in a single file line for, say, 98% of the adventure? And a Wandering Monster table with 6 one-time encounters, so the marching through tight corridors will be broken up only by more marching through tight corridors?

Ah, who am I kidding? This thing sucks!
Is there any explanation about what the maze walls are made of?
 
What are the absolute WORST dungeons ever commercially published? And why?

I'll start with Nightmare Maze of Jigresh, published by Judges Guild for Empire of the Petal Throne. I mean, just look at this shit:

View attachment 58478

That's not an amoeba, that's the map. The accompanying text isn't too bad, but why would.you ever subject your players (or yourself) to such a map? How much fun could countless hours of pointless, repetitive movement and mapping be? With a scale that seems to indicate that the party will need to be in a single file line for, say, 98% of the adventure? And a Wandering Monster table with 6 one-time encounters, so the marching through tight corridors will be broken up only by more marching through tight corridors?

Ah, who am I kidding? This thing sucks!
if I were in a game where the GM wanted us to map our progress, I would punch them in the mouth.
 
Given how stupidly popular it is I would consider X1 The Isle of Dread as being one of the worst TSR D&D modules.

The cost and danger of getting to the island is prohibitive for anybody by crazy people. It is far too large, being a couple of hundred miles long for the number of fixed encounters. You could walk around it for weeks and not trigger one of them. There is no plot. The groups at two of the sites are supposed to be antagonists, but given how far apart they are and how dangerous it is to travel, it would likely take generations before they met each other.

All this is fixable, moving the island, shrinking the size, adding a proper reason to quest there, making a plot to link various sites, adding full dungeon sites to the island, etc. But really given its place in D&D folklore, the thing is junk.
 
I remember there was a dungeon in the first Symbaroum adventure book Wrath of the Warden. It wasn't part of the main advenutre path, but an extra one.

I wouldn't say it was the worst overall, as conceptually it was fine, but it was the worst I've ever seen in terms of layout and design. It was just a nightmare to track with different room descriptions for different things (Eg the description of the room was in one location and the treasure to be found in each room was in a totally different place and stuff like that).

The second Adventure parth had an absolutely gorgeous map - see below - and yet virtually nothing was done with it, nearly every room was empty and the one's that weren't just had some monsters.
8727eff45e7d2f90d866a9157bbc776b.jpg
 
Was Judge’s Guild just shovelware? Ashcans of the early hobby that just happened, by luck, to contain some truly precious gems? I have almost all the old Judge’s Guild stuff due to hitting the dealer rooms of every SoCal convention from the mid-80’s to mid-90’s. I haven’t read it all, I come across a truly bad one and it puts me off reading them for another year or more.

Gygax‘s adventures compared to a ton of the JG stuff reads like Don DeLillo.
 
Was Judge’s Guild just shovelware?
More accurately it was indiscriminate and a company run by a gamer for gamers. Bob Bledsaw Senior was basically a nice guy and figured out how to produce this stuff for a relatively low cost and still keeping it reasonably presented. As a result he could afford to give a lot of people a chance. Hence the mix of the brilliant, OK, and wow that sucks.
 
(shrugs) It's not that Judges' Guild was a bunch of clowns. It's that in the 70s few people knew better. Take pretty much any art form just a couple years after it was created, and 90% of the output is going to be laughed at by connoisseurs a half century down the road. It's why I give Gygax and Arneson a pass for some of their boneheaded early design choices: at the time, no one knew differently. If anyone dared to write and market CSIO today, it'd be jeered at, and the common review would be that it was created by a rather inept chatbot. In 1976, it was not merely state of the art, but unique.

My vote for worst dungeon is Tomb of Horrors. Absolutely the worst example of the meanspirited "haha, how dare you bastards enjoy the levels your DMs gave you, now you all die" killer dungeon. No logic, rhyme or reason to it, full of step-here-you-die/step-there-you-don't malarkey.
 
(shrugs) It's not that Judges' Guild was a bunch of clowns. It's that in the 70s few people knew better. Take pretty much any art form just a couple years after it was created, and 90% of the output is going to be laughed at by connoisseurs a half century down the road. It's why I give Gygax and Arneson a pass for some of their boneheaded early design choices: at the time, no one knew differently. If anyone dared to write and market CSIO today, it'd be jeered at, and the common review would be that it was created by a rather inept chatbot. In 1976, it was not merely state of the art, but unique.

My vote for worst dungeon is Tomb of Horrors. Absolutely the worst example of the meanspirited "haha, how dare you bastards enjoy the levels your DMs gave you, now you all die" killer dungeon. No logic, rhyme or reason to it, full of step-here-you-die/step-there-you-don't malarkey.
Take a powerful Lich who wants to become a Demi-Lich and be even more indestructible. He knows if people put enough effort into it, they'll find him (or his skull, while he roams the planes or whatever) so hiding it isn't possible. So instead he creates the most hellish gauntlet possible so that only the greatest adventurers come to have their soul sucked so he can absorb their power.

Task your PCs with coming up with a Tomb of Horrors, they'll make shit 100 times worse than Gygax did, and they'll use the rules to do it.
 
Take a powerful Lich who wants to become a Demi-Lich and be even more indestructible. He knows if people put enough effort into it, they'll find him (or his skull, while he roams the planes or whatever) so hiding it isn't possible. So instead he creates the most hellish gauntlet possible so that only the greatest adventurers come to have their soul sucked so he can absorb their power.

Task your PCs with coming up with a Tomb of Horrors, they'll make shit 100 times worse than Gygax did, and they'll use the rules to do it.

I'm not saying that Gygax lacked an IC explanation for the thing. Nor would I stipulate that no one could come up with something worse. I'm saying it's an assholish product with assholish intent deliberately designed to be as much of a screwjob as possible without coming right out and saying "You all just die, hahaha!" off the top.

I want even "killer" adventures to be able to be solved with enough skill and forethought, or for players to genuinely have the option of retreating from a challenge that's too tough. Random chance "pull the red lever, you live / pull the blue one instead, you die" dungeons have nothing to do with skill, and the only way forethought comes into play is to have the forethought to say to the grinning DM, "Never mind, not interested. Hey, who's up for a game of Munchkin?"

The object of the game, after all, is for people to have fun. It's not for DMs to teach putatively uppity or arrogant players lessons.
 
I want even "killer" adventures to be able to be solved with enough skill and forethought, or for players to genuinely have the option of retreating from a challenge that's too tough. Random chance "pull the red lever, you live / pull the blue one instead, you die" dungeons have nothing to do with skill, and...
GM: "The archmage gives you a sheet of written instructions to bypass the death trap before the storage room" & hands players a sheet of paper with the instructions.
Later on the way back out...
P1: "We follow the trap instructions to get ot safely."
P<that guy>: "I yank the lever back and forth a couple times."
P<everyone else> "RUN!"
GM: "...really?"
P<that guy>: "I want to see what this super deadly trap supposedly does. I bet I'll live just fine."

Personally I find that most "killer adventures" are just basic real world style traps & slightly above average encounters presented without the minimum information the characters actually should have and without the usual chances to for players react or be proactive.
 
It's not just TSR, quite a few of the early RPG products show off an antagonistic tournament style play that was apparently common in the early days of the hobby. You find similar in some of the Tunnel's and Trolls adventures, and Grimtooth's traps include loads of basically save or die traps. I think by the later traps books they were more of a joke, maybe even parodying that type of play but the early ones were about as serious as T&T gets (always a bit tongue in cheek).

I got started in the late 70s when that was not as common and was actually pushed back on in the intros to many games and articles. TPK had by that time become more of a failure than simply PCs failing to meet the challenge.
 
I'm not saying that Gygax lacked an IC explanation for the thing. Nor would I stipulate that no one could come up with something worse. I'm saying it's an assholish product with assholish intent deliberately designed to be as much of a screwjob as possible without coming right out and saying "You all just die, hahaha!" off the top.

I want even "killer" adventures to be able to be solved with enough skill and forethought, or for players to genuinely have the option of retreating from a challenge that's too tough. Random chance "pull the red lever, you live / pull the blue one instead, you die" dungeons have nothing to do with skill, and the only way forethought comes into play is to have the forethought to say to the grinning DM, "Never mind, not interested. Hey, who's up for a game of Munchkin?"

The object of the game, after all, is for people to have fun. It's not for DMs to teach putatively uppity or arrogant players lessons.
Fun facts about the Tomb of Horrors: 1) there is absolutely nothing in it at any point that prevents the characters from retreating and leaving. There is no “push” and the only “pull” is the players’ curiosity and greed. The dungeon is entirely static. They can give up at any time.

2) there is a place in the tomb with a lever that if pushed one way produced a positive result and if pushed the other way triggers a trap, with no indication of which is which. However, there is no need to pull the lever either way - the entire thing can (and should) be bypassed completely.

The Tomb exists both in the world and in the game as a honeypot testing ground for overconfident adventurers who think they are tough enough to handle anything. If their characters die inside it, they only have themselves to blame.
 
I think ToH is a truly great dungeon, with one exception (that appears repeatedly but always in the same form): Gygax loved to impose spot rules that made traps and encounters far more deadly, in the form of stipulations that that this or that spell won't work, or that nothing you can do can prevent the following outcome. To me, this is total horseshit DM'ing: go ahead and fill the place with wild traps and horrific monsters, but then play by the rules! The game isn't fun if you effectively change the way essential elements of it work to achieve a certain outcome. I feel like Gygax is effectively railroading in these passages, because he has a preconception of exactly how players need to solve a certain situation and then makes up a spot rule that makes that the only possible outcome. Where is the fun in that? The game is supposed to be about players coming up with creative solutions to problems and the DM adjudicating how they turn out, according to the rules and common sense. But, it's on you if you slavishly follow him down this path. ToH is an amazing dungeon if you run it like a normal person.
 
I think ToH is a truly great dungeon, with one exception (that appears repeatedly but always in the same form): Gygax loved to impose spot rules that made traps and encounters far more deadly, in the form of stipulations that that this or that spell won't work, or that nothing you can do can prevent the following outcome. To me, this is total horseshit DM'ing: go ahead and fill the place with wild traps and horrific monsters, but then play by the rules! The game isn't fun if you effectively change the way essential elements of it work to achieve a certain outcome. I feel like Gygax is effectively railroading in these passages, because he has a preconception of exactly how players need to solve a certain situation and then makes up a spot rule that makes that the only possible outcome. Where is the fun in that? The game is supposed to be about players coming up with creative solutions to problems and the DM adjudicating how they turn out, according to the rules and common sense. But, it's on you if you slavishly follow him down this path. ToH is an amazing dungeon if you run it like a normal person.

Yeah I like ToH but this is the most bullshit move Gygax pulls, thankfully it can be easily ignored.
 
I think it’s important to remember that tournament modules were created so that at conventions you could have an easy and consistent way to judge competitions between adventuring groups (i.e. whoever dies farthest from the entrance “wins”).

But then DMs wanted to buy those adventures and put them in their campaigns, which is not what they were designed for.

Back in the day, we would often play through the tournament modules, but we would use appropriately levelled characters that were created just for that adventure. We weren’t attached to them, and it was a fun diversion from a regular campaign, which was the whole point.
 
I think ToH is a truly great dungeon, with one exception (that appears repeatedly but always in the same form): Gygax loved to impose spot rules that made traps and encounters far more deadly, in the form of stipulations that that this or that spell won't work, or that nothing you can do can prevent the following outcome. To me, this is total horseshit DM'ing: go ahead and fill the place with wild traps and horrific monsters, but then play by the rules! The game isn't fun if you effectively change the way essential elements of it work to achieve a certain outcome. I feel like Gygax is effectively railroading in these passages, because he has a preconception of exactly how players need to solve a certain situation and then makes up a spot rule that makes that the only possible outcome. Where is the fun in that? The game is supposed to be about players coming up with creative solutions to problems and the DM adjudicating how they turn out, according to the rules and common sense. But, it's on you if you slavishly follow him down this path. ToH is an amazing dungeon if you run it like a normal person.

This is what I mean by an antagonistic style. Some of the earlier stuff was almost GM vs the players. Surviving to the end was a win for the players, a TPK a win for the GM. It was more of a challenge to be beat, and failing to win was expected to be high.
Later the concept of an impartial GM won out and that is the attitude that most games have pushed since about 1980.

I don't think the antagonistic GM vs the players was ever the implied "one true way", but I think because tournament play was such a big part of the early days, you find it in a lot of the early published adventures. My impression is that early tournament play was kind of seen as gladiatorial combat, there were scores and rankings that carried forward, so adventures had to be difficult so that there was a more nuanced how well did you win or lose, where most adventures today are more pass / fail with the balance leaning towards passing.

I never participated in tournament RPG play, but it was still fairly prevalent at Cons in my early days of playing. This is just the opinion I formed hearing about it second hand.
 
This is what I mean by an antagonistic style. Some of the earlier stuff was almost GM vs the players. Surviving to the end was a win for the players, a TPK a win for the GM. It was more of a challenge to be beat, and failing to win was expected to be high.
Later the concept of an impartial GM won out and that is the attitude that most games have pushed since about 1980.

I don't think the antagonistic GM vs the players was ever the implied "one true way", but I think because tournament play was such a big part of the early days, you find it in a lot of the early published adventures. My impression is that early tournament play was kind of seen as gladiatorial combat, there were scores and rankings that carried forward, so adventures had to be difficult so that there was a more nuanced how well did you win or lose, where most adventures today are more pass / fail with the balance leaning towards passing.

I never participated in tournament RPG play, but it was still fairly prevalent at Cons in my early days of playing. This is just the opinion I formed hearing about it second hand.
This happened a lot, back in the day. Even when people should have known better. Ken St. Andre wrote in the T&T rulebook something to the effect that that there should always be some chance, some way, to escape a trap or monster, even if it meant running away, or required skilled and thoughtful play.Yet he also said, in Naked Doom, "I admit it. I am trying to kill your character."
 
This happened a lot, back in the day. Even when people should have known better. Ken St. Andre wrote in the T&T rulebook something to the effect that that there should always be some chance, some way, to escape a trap or monster, even if it meant running away, or required skilled and thoughtful play.Yet he also said, in Naked Doom, "I admit it. I am trying to kill your character."

Yeah, I mentioned T&T and Grimtooth's Traps in my earlier post.

T&T as a game system is generally one of the more friendly towards PCs, one of the reasons it is high on my list of games to recommend for people introducing young players to RPGs.

When you find material with pretty blatant "good job, sleep well, I'll likely kill you in the morning" even in T&T it shows how widely that style of play was early on.
 
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