When Dice Were Made of Flint #3

It was 1978 when I got my first rulebook: the Games Workshop printing of the Holmes Basic rules with a John Blanche scene of a warrior and a dragon printed in silver on a dark blue cover. The next step was obvious: having played a couple of games in a friend’s dungeon, I had to create my own.

I drew a suitable complex on several sheets of graph paper, covering the first two levels and adding stairs down to more. I wrote a long and detailed backstory for the place – an ancient tomb complex that had been taken over by an orc tribe (with worse things on the lower levels, I promised myself) and an evil wizard behind it all.

I called it The Tombs of Althragan (inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan, which I had just finished reading) and I named the evil wizard Galthazzeth. The orcs called him Sharku Gharash: Sharku – “old man” in Orcish – was stolen from The Two Towers, which I had also read recently, and Gharash was as close as an Orc could come to pronouncing Galthazzeth, I decided. The hallowed tombs of Althragan became the forbidding dungeon of Athra-Ghash. Then I populated the map with orcs and undead (those Harryhausen skeletons never lost their hold on me), and various other monsters from the rulebook.

A typical zoo dungeon of the time had traps and monsters scattered throughout, more or less at random. The emphasis was on creating tactical challenges rather than making narrative sense, but I was young and so was the art of dungeon design.

It was also what one writer of the time called a “mainframe dungeon” – a huge and sprawling complex with a potentially unlimited number of levels. The term “mainframe” was stolen from computing, where it referred to one of those computers that took up a whole floor of a building, with tape drives like a row of IKEA wardrobes, and was accessed via multiple terminals – and which had the computing power of a TV remote today. Not the TV itself, mind – just the remote.

Shop-bought adventures for D&D (and adventures for other games were very hard to find, even in the darkest and dingiest of hobby shops) were called “dungeon modules,” implying that they could be slotted into a dungeon, although this was easier said than done. It was easier to slot them into a campaign, but in those early days almost no one knew what a campaign was.

Despite this, many fledgling dungeon masters – myself included – were prone to making airy pronouncements about “working on my campaign,” which everyone knew was about the same as an English undergraduate “working on their novel.” Those truly were simpler times.

I took my dungeon to the group, it was duly bashed, and everyone seemed to have a good time. This is it, I thought. I’m a Dungeon Master now.