The last campaign I ran before this one was a mix of The Village of Hommlet and The Keep on the Borderlands. I replaced the inner town of the Keep with Hommlet, placed the Moathouse in the Environs of the Keep, and scattered the Caves of Chaos all around the map. I then let players enter the Keep as normal, roleplay with the NPCs, grab adventure hooks and rumors, then head out into the map to run into wandering monsters, random encounters, and find the dungeons, the Caves of Chaos and the Moathouse.
This all sounds OSR as fuck, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Build a huge ass sandbox with all these elements and then the players choose what they can do to create an emergent story
But it was exhausting to run and the actual time the players spent crawling through dungeons and fighting monsters was about 1/5th of the whole session
bookended by trips to town, buying selling gear, calculating XP and gold, etc... So much time doing telemetry and accounting and almost none doing dungeons.
My current game has all player services available in a single tavern, and the dungeon is a short jaunt away. So much more time spent doing something and not accounting for it.
Also, in my opinion the Caves of Chaos are just not fun dungeons. The Moathouse isn't fun either, but it feels more like a real place.
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