#Blaugust2019 Day 3 -- Barrowmaze Delving on Roll20

Do it! Just Google the word "Barrowmaze" and you'll find more links than you would think possible of reviews and information about this particular Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It's legendary. It's the ultimate Dungeon Crawl in a huge Mega-Dungeon that just goes on and on.

This is old-school role playing at its finest. 

The Barrowmaze was originally written by one Dr. Greg Gillespie. He's an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario and actually teaches a class there on pop culture and role playing games . . . and apparently is a blogger himself!

The Barrowmaze gained a lot of renewed attention when it was re-released in the D&D 5e ruleset thanks to a successful kickstarter, but the one thing most geeks know about the Barrowmaze is that 1- It's deadly and 2- The most impressive part of this dungeon is its sheer size. When they say "mega-dungeon" they aren't kidding.  You can easily get 100 long play sessions out of this dungeon.

I'm playing through this one with the infamous Jeff Toney as our DM and a few other cool people like The Art of Warlord, Vanessa Mythdust, Professor Falmea and Decius. (My word, we all got crazy handle names except for Jeff Toney -- I guess that's not true, technically his handle for fun work stuff is The Gobbler King.)

Jeff DMs this game every other Thursday for us on Roll20.net, and because of that is redrawing the entire map for his campaign to fit the Roll20 format.

In the Barrowmaze, you begin as level 0 characters who basically die if you breathe on them the wrong way. In the beginning of the campaign, it's best to try to keep your distance from monsters and get lucky with treasure until you get 100 xp. At that point, you're level 1 and Jeff will make you a personalized token for your Barrowmaze adventures.

My character is the green half-orc named "Gumby." He's a fighter that uses a spear and is about as smart as a bag of rocks. Which reminds me . . . another thing about your Barrowmaze characters, they are made with 6 3d6 rolls straight in a line from Strength through Charisma and what you get is what you get. 

Our game this week was pretty great. We managed to fight a couple rats and got surprised by a couple of ghouls who burst through the door below when they heard the scuffle. Gumby was in great form and saved the level zero characters from being eaten alive by rats with a brave action surge and taking a risky opportunity attack from one of the Ghouls. If Gumby would have blown his Constitution saving throw, he would have been paralyzed and pretty much a tasty snack for the Ghouls.

This is actually my second time running through the Mega Dungeon. The first time was over lunch breaks once a week at work for around a year until our DM, Ben Durbin, wasn't able to host anymore. It's so huge that there's no way to memorize your way around and it's easy to get lost.

Needless to say, it's a good dungeon and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to pick up a new adventure. You can get it at Drive Thru RPG.

Happy Dueling!