Also Note -- this process is spoiler-ladened -- in fact, it's designed to be spoiler-ladened. I'm digging here. Trying to find the treasure that makes Barrowmaze unique and awesome.
First off, I don't necessarily think that Barrowmaze is the greatest D&D-esque adventure ever produced. My fucking PLAYERS do, though! Every time there's a hint that they might be able to find the Barrow Field and beneath it, that maze of halls scattered with their dead characters and packed with lurking undead and treasure, they lose their fucking minds. They immediately run away from any seeds that I've personally planted in the campaign world, and we spend multiple sessions re-mapping the barrow field (because they lost their previous maps), spend hours digging into covered barrows (was this the one with all the platinum?) and collectively decide that this...THIS!...is what D&D looks like.
I grouse, but I'm fine with it. It's a damn good adventure. Barrowmaze is a straightforward D&D megadungeon (even though it's "flat") with a theme that leans heavily towards undead. It's cleanly written, cleanly laid out, and the map, while a fucking beast to follow in the book, is black and white and easily used at a glance.
There is a sort-of story with a few story elements scattered across the field, maze, and now with Barrowmaze Complete, the wilderness, but it's the definition of light touch. All of that can be ignored, or linked out to other stuff in your campaign world, as needed. And the thing is so damn big, that you can cut it up, slap a bunch of your own stuff in there, spread it across the world, or otherwise, strip it down and use it for its component parts. I've run Barrowmaze with standard B/X/etc. rules, Labyrinth Lord (no stretch), and Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. This is a design feature -- flexibility. And I love it.
In addition, it's well written and edited. The art is phenomenally old school (I mean, Erol Otus did the damn cover).
So, at a glance, my big areas of analysis are the following:
- Concept -- How does the overall concept of the adventure (ancient burial mounds that have lately become the focal point of the forces of Chaos) work within the milieu (how's that for a Gygax word?)? And more importantly, is this another succession of "orc with 1d4 pies" encounters that gets tired really fast?
- Implementation -- This is the quality of the book (physical), the writing/editing/layout, and in general, the tools that Greg developed to both differentiate the adventure from other adventures and that you can drop into your GM toolbox for other uses.
- Preparation -- How much work is it to get this beast ready for play? And what did I have to cut/change/replace to make it playable at my table?
- Actual Play -- How does it run? What's the player reaction? Possibly I'll post some session reports with more of a "designer's" eye than simply reporting what happened in the session.
We'll see if I can follow this up with another post within the previous record of 5 months...
