Last week I ran my first session with The Fantasy Trip by Steve Jackson Games as part of my most recent hobby pact. This weekend, after a positive session of something completely different, I found myself designing a simple TFT dungeon called, “The Lost Lair”.

“Run a TFT open table megadungeon at the school club for 6 weekly sessions,” I said to myself. I was really excited back at the beginning but then I had this weird mental and emotional block whenever I sat down to try and draw a dungeon map.

The solution was the decision to simply play with whatever felt good. I didn’t want to sweat about it. Instead I decided to take a playful approach. After last week’s Melee game, I’d found the joy of the game. I had a breakthrough idea in a dream the next night.

Inspired by the Roman on the cover of Melee, I decided that my part of Cidri would be Britannic and feature Romans and Celts up on The Wall that was completely not Hadrian’s. I fancied there’d be Orcs out there among the woad barbarians and their ancient ruins.

Having discovered Shadekeep and the Shamat map-making tool, I sat down this morning to mess around and knock up a simple dungeon that might be a way into the bigger idea of a megadungeon. Start small, I thought. It was fun and after an hour of learning I pressed print.

From there, I took some advice from a friend and used the random dungeon stocking tables inside In The Labyrinth to figure out what might be inside. Like any old-school dungeon maker, I used many of the rolls but dropped some when a better idea got sparked.

I’ve decided to pull on some of the other resources from the Big Box sets I own, including the pre-made Hero and Wizard fighters. I found some useful pre-gen Orcs, for example, and grabbed one or two of the monster stat cards for reference.

Because the Melee and Wizard booklets in the printed game sets are ridiculously small, I printed off a copy of those rules in A4 from the .pdf files. I grabbed out the rather lush megahexes for use at the table with the tokens.

The Lost Lair is a simple dungeon with a few basic foes, at least one nasty monster, and a small quantity of treasure. It leads the curious a couple of levels deep below a ruin to the entrance of something potentially larger. There are traps and secrets to discover.

All in all, I’ve had a couple of hours enjoying creating a location that might become something more significant. Or not. That’s the nature of tiny experiments: sometimes they work but you don’t know until you test the idea.

Either way, now I am ready for Tuesday: we can play Wizard but we could also delve the dungeon.

Game on!