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Complete post can be found here. My take? It's literally location, location, location. And that's fine. I'd like to have seen some examples, though.
Someone dropped me a line about this thread, so I thought I'd give a little more detail.
Pretty much at random, I decided that the OD&D dungeon would be an abandoned temple of Poseidon. I drew my map and started to stock it.
For the main altar area, I penciled in a huge statue of Poseidon, a bunch of columns carved to look like kraken, and a giant pool of water. My instincts at that point would then be to find monsters that would fit into that area, creatures that could use the pool in interesting ways (a aquatic spellcaster that the characters couldn't reach; critters that could climb the columns and attack from above), but OD&D doesn't really support that style. The creatures are really, really simple, so any special effects would have to come from the room.
That's when things got interesting. What if the room itself was the interesting bit, and whatever monsters were there just made the room more interesting, rather than vice versa?
I ended up with the following:
* The pool was a sacrificial pit, with offerings of gold and jewels thrown into it. Some treasure was still down there for the taking.
* Touching the pool was sacrilege, and any non-Poseidon worshiper who touched it sparked the sea god's wrath. The temple doors slammed shut and water poured from the columns to drown intruders. Of course, items could enter the pit just fine, so thinking of a way to use a pole or net to grab them would avoid Poseidon's anger.
* A trap door in the ceiling provided an escape from the flooded room, but you couldn't really spot it until the water level lifted you up to see it. Even then, you had to tap the ceiling/look for it.
* The state had a system of bellows and speaking tubes that allowed a high priest hidden in a secret chamber next door to "speak" with the voice of Poseidon.
* Later on, as I fleshed out the rest of the temple, I added short descriptions of murals on the walls that provided clues to other tricks and traps (a flooding chamber used for living sacrifices; a hidden door leading to a treasure room; the garb required to pass into the crypts). The murals also provided clues for the trap in the main temple.
* For the finishing touch, I decided that the "monster" in the room was a gnome illusionist who had discovered the secret speaking chamber. Speaking as Poseidon, he would demand sacrifices, order adventurers to engage in quests in his name, and so on. When dealing with troublemakers or adventurers who doubted him, he'd try to lure them into reaching into the pool to trigger the temple's death trap.
That's one example. Other stuff I've added to adventures with this process included the haunted skull of a dead adventurer that answered questions about the dungeon in return for a proper burial, the statue of a sea nymph that beguiled adventurers into adorning it with jewelry and other treasures, and a puzzle room where the priests of Poseidon ritually drowned heretics. That room had a sequence of actions you could take to unlock a sealed vault, but you could only learn the actions by studying the murals and tomes in a few, scattered rooms.