Barrowmaze - A Campaign Retrospective

 A Barrowmaze Campaign Retrospective

Barrowmaze is an old-school mega-dungeon written for Labyrinth Lord (specifially the AD&D variant, which isn't stated by the book). For the uninitiated, a megadungeon is a massive dungeon that is intended to be the central location for an entire campaign of play. Typically a mega-dungeon will have multiple levels (Barrowmaze is actually flat, getting harder as players move north and east), multiple factions, and hundreds of rooms.

My group ran the adventure using Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy. We typically had 4-5 players, all of whom have been playing fantasy RPGs for roughly 20 years, most of us starting with 3^rd edition Dungeons and Dragons.

A later version of the player's map of the Barrowmaze. Sadly, Dungeonscrawl had an error, and eventually the map file became unusable. A real tragedy.

I can't say for certain how many sessions—or how much real time—my group spent delving into Barrowmaze. A wild guess is a little over a year of real time, totaling roughly 50-60 sessions. As you might have noticed, there was an attempt on this blog to do session summaries in the early days, but eventually I lost steam, which is a shame in hindsight.

Early Days

The campaign started strong, with Barry the barbarian (an all-time favorite character of mine), bringing together a band of misfit adventurers to explore the Barrowmaze. Barry was a surviving character from a previous short campaign, so he came in as an experienced level 3 character, which helped to keep the neophytes alive. This actually worked better for my group, since they weren't exactly eager for a meat grinder.

In their very first session, the party found a secret entrance (Barrow 20) and quickly mapped large portions of the dungeon. Within a few sessions they found enough treasure to get the characters some levels, found quite a number of magic items and built a safe room in the very first secret room they discovered.

So far, so good. So what happened? Did we "complete" the megadungeon? Not even close. Here are my thoughts, having run as much of this dungeon as my players were willing to subject themselves to:

Praises

Early on, the excitement of exploring the maze was a big selling point. There are tons of areas to explore, secrets to discover, and nasty surprises around almost every corner. The maze is stuffed with magic items and all kinds of treasure, so it rewards players in a classic OSR fashion.

There are numerous aspects of the dungeon that I think are really engaging:

1. The Barrows. The single best element of Barrowmaze is the barrow fields on the surface above the megadungeon itself. Each of these mini-dungeons, sometimes even single rooms, offer bite-sized delves that often felt more interesting than aspects of the larger dungeon below. I also find the random barrow generator a helpful tool for sparking ideas for small dungeons that you can throw down in almost any campaign. Some of the barrows are better than others (looking at you, six traps in a row barrow) but overall, they get a big thumbs up.
2. Theme. This place is filthy with undead (figuratively and literally). If your players want to battle the unliving, this is the place for them. We've got tombs, we've got barrows, we've got crypts, we've got coffins, sarcophagi, urns, skeletons, zombies, ghosts, phantoms, specters, etc. etc. No matter how you feel about Barrowmaze as a whole, it is the undead dungeon.
3. Runic Tablets. An inspired dungeon element. My players were always tempted to read the tablets, and the tablets resulted in some great moments, right until someone finally rolled a 1 and died reading one. After that, tablets were avoided entirely. I would like to have the table of effects be a bit more balanced between good and terrible. The good stuff is pretty bland for the most part, while the bad stuff is crippling. Regardless, the players always had a reaction to finding runic tablets, which is what we want. Any reaction is better than apathy.
   
   The tablets caused the best running gag of the campaign: Kazrik the dwarf, played by friend Ryan, read a tablet that cursed him with amnesia. He only remembered the events of the Barrowmaze while within the confines of the dungeon and its above-ground area. This meant that every time they were in town, he always wondered when they'd finally be delving into that dungeon people keep talking about, and didn't understand how he became so damn rich. Then, when they'd finally get to the Barrowmoor, he'd fall to his knees in horror as all of the memories came flooding back. It made for some great dark comedy every time.
4. Undead Variety. The diversity of undead in the book is impressive. Players began to learn that the rune-zombies burst into flames, some zombies are harder to turn than others, and there are things that look undead but are actually constructs. This forced them to learn the dungeon, even if the fights sometimes became boring, dice-rolling slogs.
5. Treasure quantity. A common complaint I see with a lot of old-school modules is that they are really stingy when it comes to treasure. A handful of silver pieces and a 25 gp gemstone, that kind of thing. While the early areas of the maze do suffer a bit from that, it quickly escalates to the point where PCs were taking large hauls on most of their delves. For us, this led to a lot of tough decision making on what loot was worth carrying and what needed to be left. It also meant that the PCs advanced at a decent pace. The typical group included 4-5 PCs, 2-3 class-leveled retainers and 3 porters. That is a lot of divided shares, but when we stopped, the party had two 6th-level characters and a few 5th level ones.

Critiques

Even early on there were warning signs of what would eventually become my greatest critiques. Firstly, Barrowmaze feels like it's something out of 1980, and admittedly that's the intent of the author. However, it was published in 2014, and really didn't take advantage of the "wisdom of the OSR" in a way that could have greatly improved the dungeon. The dungeon has a lot going for it, but I can't say I'd recommend it. Here is a quick list of my biggest issues that arose after extended play:

Design Philosophy Issues

1. Traps. Traps in Barrowmaze feel less like puzzles and more like penalties. There's little in the way of foreshadowing, logic, or diegetic reasoning—hallmarks of good OSR trap design. Save or die poison gas? Crossbow trap in a room? There are lots of traps in this place and almost none of them were interesting. I want to make my players think, plan, and live or die based on their intuition and choices. The traps in the maze don't do that. I actually told my players point blank that there were tons of pointless pit traps in the dungeon and we will be ignoring all of them. (I am aware they could be used by clever players to fight/trap unintelligent undead, but everyone agreed that the gain of such events wasn't worth the mental load.)
2. Boring magic items. Magic items are more than power boosts, they're narrative inflection points. When every +1 sword feels the same, the dungeon stops telling stories. I understand that this is a massive dungeon, with nearly 600 rooms if you include sub-rooms and surface barrows, but there are so many +1 swords or +2 suits of armor. It's almost an old-school meme at this point that characters end up having a golf bag of +1 weapons, and this became literally true for us (Barry was carrying 4 magic swords at one point). My prep time started being used creating a list of magic items that I would drop in to replace the endless cache of boring swords, rings of protection, and enchanted shields.
3. Secret Doors. I'm a big proponent of secret doors and interesting oddities, but Barrowmaze is a great example of what not to do. The dungeon has more secret doors than you can shake a stick at, and almost none of them have any kind of annotation. My design philosophy is that if there is a secret door, it needs to either be obvious with a hidden trigger, have a secret door with a strange trigger the players can deduce with clever play, or some manner of interesting interactivity. Barrowmaze does not do this. All of the doors simply exist without clues or context. Sometimes there's negative space while mapping, but often times that's not even true. My house rule is that elves get a secret, GM facing 2-in-6 chance to just notice secret doors automatically (because elves, man) and that ended up being 2/3 of the secret doors the PCs discovered.
   
   The glut of unhinted secret doors breaks the core exploration loop. Players stop searching not because they're lazy, but because there's no diegetic justification. Instead of rewarding curiosity, the dungeon wants players to waste their time pushing against random walls for no reason, hoping that this time, they figured out that there is something here. It can feel great when it pays off, but a lot of the time, it just feels punitive.

Content and Encounter Design

1. Factions. This is a bit of a misnomer. The maze does have factions, but they aren't really ones you can work with. The mongrelmen became my PCs friends (even after the party accidentally got them slaughtered by an undead horror they set loose). There are the gargoyles, the harpies, two cults, and a faction of ghouls. However, most of these aren't really that easy to play off of. It's made very clear in the book that the cults are EVIL, the ghouls feel shoehorned in via a single faction room. My players befriended the gargoyles as best they could, and never encountered the harpies. Basically everything you encounter in the dungeon is undead, not factions, so it feels like a lost opportunity. Compare this to other well-known megadungeons like Arden Vul, which thrives on faction play, and you realize that Barrowmaze is mostly about fighting skeletons—with little room for reaction rolls or meaningful interaction.
   
   Factions aren't just color, they are levers for player choice. They provide alternate paths, make the dungeon feel alive, and offer long-term goals beyond "clear the next room." Barrowmaze gestures at this but rarely delivers.
2. Undead, undead, undead. Basically everything you encounter in the dungeon is an undead monster or a construct. Reaction rolls, one of the most interesting aspects of OSR play, becomes a non-factor. One of my players' biggest complaints was that the maze feels like a slog, and that's fair, it is. Undead always attack, they never run, and they are generally mindless. This leads to a lot of "HP tax" fights. Undead vary in stats, but not in behavior. Because they all attack mindlessly, variety becomes surface-deep. Without different goals or reactions, every room becomes a slightly reshuffled math problem.
3. Monotone environments. The entire dungeon is basically a single, massive crypt complex. Dark stone halls, dark stone rooms, with undead monsters. One of the biggest strengths of interesting megadungeons is their varied environments. One of my favorite memories from a short Arden Vul campaign was when the players entered the massive mushroom forest just out a door from roman-style ruins. Barrowmaze never evoked that kind of wonder. There were crazy rooms, such as the pyromancer's tomb, but those were rare and often brought the players into "puzzle mode" instead of diegetic wonder.
4. The Slog. The Tomb of Thar exemplifies the design excesses that turned our late-game sessions into a joyless march. What starts as an intriguing idea (a legendary hunter's fabled tomb) quickly becomes a punishing, repetitive, and ultimately unfun combat grind. To make my point clear, here's the list of monsters the PCs must fight in order, in rooms that do not let them retreat:
   • 6 pyre zombies (HD 2)
   • 1 Barrow Wight (HD 6)
   • Juju zombies (HD 4)
   • Greater Barrow Guardian (HD 6) guarding a cursed spear -3
   • 1d4+1 cave bears (HD 7)
   • 1d4+1 man-eating apes (HD 5)
   • 1d4+1 Hell Hounds (HD 7)
   • 1d4+1 Owl Bears (HD 5)
   • 1 Hydra (HD 12)
   • 1 T-Rex (HD 20)
   • Finally a HD 9 vampire aided by 2 Wights (HD 3)
   These are spread over roughly 5 rooms. The book isn't really clear if you can retreat after completing each room, but it feels like the intent is to do them all in one go or fail. Barrowmaze mistakes attrition for tension. What could be a test of clever resource use becomes a lockstep encounter chain. The Hydra and T-Rex room is cool because it transports the PCs to a prehistoric demi-plane. That's cool as shit. The rest are just a war-of-attrition that robs players of any real, meaningful choice.

Why did we stop?

Despite the group's deep investment, we stopped because the dungeon stopped rewarding smart play. It became punishing, repetitive, and joyless. The truth is, the later areas of the dungeon have a steep jump in difficulty and it had started to suck the fun out of the game for the players. Early delves provided meaningful momentum. Each delve uncovered a dozen rooms or more. By the later sessions, delving into the Sepulcar of the Elements or the Secret Shrine of Set felt grueling. Many of the delves resulted in simply unavoidable PC deaths (petrification, punitive magical traps, etc.) and often the PCs would only get through a few rooms before retreating to town to recuperate for several days. The final nail in the coffin was a pair of Steel Skeletons that the party needed to get past to get into the Shrine, and so they ended up in a 10 round combat with a pair of steel constructs where each side just punched each other like a Rocky movie. Nobody really enjoyed it; there were no tactics. These were just high HD skeleton golems with 50% magic immunity that the module wanted them to suffer through to get into the shrine.

After that final session, I asked my players to be honest about their feelings. Most of them admitted that the fun had kind of been drained and we were just delving for the sake of completeness. They had closed the Pit of Chaos, used magic to divine the nature of the greatest threat within the dungeon, and now it was just a matter of slowly digging their way to the end. I admire the dedication, but if we're going to spend our limited RPG time together playing something, I want them to look forward to it, and Barrowmaze had drained that joy from them, seemingly designed with a punitive ethos that clashed with our table's playstyle. My players thrive on interesting choices; they like challenges that ask them to approach something with thought and care. Kicking in the next door filled with 183 square alcoves and 6 juju zombies waiting in darkness for players to show up does not fit that requirement.

So that was that. I asked if they wanted to complete their most recently stated goal (save the Mongrelman Crab-Claw after nearly a year in-game of looking for him), complete the whole thing, or move on to something else. They opted for the latter. In the end, I think Barrowmaze just outstayed its welcome. The joy of discovery and the early advancements were eventually replaced with an unenticing grind. Gillespie's personal preference for what feels like antagonistic GMing does not fit my group, and while I certainly did manage to mitigate it for the most part, the gameplay loop had finally run its course. The players had seen enough to know what this place was about, and even knowing what awaited them at the end, they just didn't care enough to see it through. And you know what? That's fine. I want to run things that they want to play.

The Megadungeon Triangle

So what does a great megadungeon need to sustain long-term engagement? In my experience, it's a balance between three pillars:

• Exploration (choice-rich spatial design)
• Factions & Interactivity (social and mechanical depth)
• Combat & Challenge (varied tactical engagement)

Barrowmaze excels at 1 early on, but falters at 2 and eventually at 3. That imbalance is why it wears out its welcome.

Verdict and Final Thoughts

So we come to the heart of the matter. Would I recommend that someone run Barrowmaze as a mega-dungeon for their group? No. I can't, in good faith, make that recommendation. I think there are aspects of this module that I really enjoyed, and things to take from it, but on the whole I can't say I think it's worth your group's time. There are simply better products that operate in the same space. If you just can't live without a seemingly endless undead tomb for your gaming table, by all means. But if your group is looking to try out playing in a mega-dungeon, I think your group would have more fun with Arden Vul, Stonehell (by that other Michael Curtis), Castle Xyntillan, or Castle Whiterock.

Barrowmaze is ambitious, but it's also a product of its time, and the OSR scene has had a lot of really great developments in the theory of how we play "door D&D" (to quote Brad Kerr) in the last decade. We each only get so many hours to play TTRPGs with our friends. You deserve to play content that excites you and your players. At one time, Barrowmaze was a breath of (dead) air, but in 2025, we've come a long way and there are other more interesting campaigns you could be running.

Barrowmaze is worth dissecting, if not deploying. It reveals both the enduring strengths and limitations of early megadungeon design. There's value in learning what doesn't work for your table, and there's value in moving on when it stops being fun.