Easy-to-GM Dungeon Crawl?

[Gray Warden]

Hi everyone,

do you know of any good dungeon crawl pretty easy to handle for a newb and very busy GM, but nonetheless challenging for the players?

I have quite a good knowledge of Pathfinder rules, but I have never GM'd before. My current GM in RotR prefers to skip sessions when someone is missing rather than playing without them. Since sometimes players might not be available at the last minute, it would be great to have a back-up game that I can GM when we're not playing the main campaign, that can be easily set-up without much preparation time on my part.

Any ideas? Thank you all in advance!

[GM Rednal]

-Rubs chin-

Since it sounds like you might have a rotating cast of people playing, may I suggest buying and using some Pathfinder Society scenarios? You don't have to use the full PFS rules (although you can if you want to). That way, it won't matter too much who's missing (most scenarios can be completed in one decent-length session), and while they're not too hard most of the time, you can just toss in a few more monsters to up the difficulty.

If you want pure dungeon-crawling on-demand, there are also some online generators that can create maps, encounters, treasures, and more.

[Mark Hoover 330]

For one-shots, I second the PFS scenarios/modules. For ongoing dungeon hacking there are 2 products from Frog God Games that are pretty straight forward: The Lost City of Barakus and Rappan Athuk. Both come in Pathfinder versions, both primarily focus on dungeon hacks and each has plenty to challenge even experienced players.

Or, y'know, make a few yourself. I know you're saying you're busy but using the 5-Room Dungeon motif you can make a quick challenge for your players.

The method, which I'm linking here is pretty simple. The first encounter sets the tone of the dungeon, the second is a trick, trap, skill challenge, or just an "oddball" kind of encounter, the third is a setback that slows the PCs from accomplishing their goal, the fourth is the climax of the dungeon and the fifth is either an epilogue and reward or some further consequence of the dungeon.

They're easy to make and making a couple you could string them together into a larger dungeon. Also they don't have to be 5 physical rooms or even a dungeon. You could make getting info for their mission a 5-room dungeon involving mostly social encounters, then have 5 overland scenes encompassing the party's travel TO the dungeon, then finally give them the actual "dungeon" to hack.