I recently finished running my players through some of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which I had used as part of our campaign quest to find the Rod of Seven Parts.

In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, the designers expected the players to create a map of their explorations. (The DM could gain much humour by comparing the player map to their own). Gary Gygax, in particular, liked throwing challenges at his players and made the structures hard to map. I believe Robert Kuntz was brilliant at remembering dungeons layouts without aid.

Drawing maps relates to a significant element of the game: exploration. The players are creating a document of where they have explored. Creating it accurately also means it is easier to identify where hidden passages or rooms – and treasures! – might be, then a particular aspect of a player’s skills is rewarded.

However, the other side of this is that it can take a long time, and it is time that may be very frustrating to both players and DM. This is especially true when it is only one player mapping and going back and forth with the DM for several minutes as the characters explore each new area.

“Modern” play – heck, it started many years ago now! – depreciates mapping, either by having small dungeons that need little mapping or by having the DM draw out the map themselves. With the rise of virtual play – on Roll20, Foundry, Fantasy Grounds or others – it is a lot easier for the DM to design the map, hide it from the players, and reveal it as they explore.

As a side note: Maps are a useful visualisation tool for players.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is an adventure that is definitely from the early days of D&D. It debuted as a tournament adventure; the characters have a limited amount of time to enter the dungeon – a crashed spaceship! – explore, and leave.

It is particularly notable for the large number of empty rooms on its map. The text doesn’t entirely ignore these rooms, but it repeatedly uses a single paragraph to describe these rooms. (On the first level, they are apartments).

Why have so many empty rooms?

In this case, there are two significant reasons:

• It is a colony spaceship. It needs that many rooms to feel right.
• It is a pain to detail them all. You do NOT want monsters in every room. Plus,
  • It is a printed adventure. There are space considerations.

Those reasons interlock, and as a result, the DM must run a dungeon with a lot of similar rooms and with little help to vary them.

Now, the DM can detail additional rooms if they like. But there is something else to consider. And that is the pacing and structure of the adventure.

When the characters enter this dungeon (or any dungeon), everything is new to them. The first room sets the tone for what follows, and each successful room reinforces this tone.

However, the aspect of discovering the new disappears as play continues. There is a new baseline, and it is only things that vary from that which are essential. Now, in a small dungeon, you can describe every room uniquely, but the larger the area, the more difficult this is to achieve – if you even want to achieve it!

One of the tricks the DM can use as the players get more familiar with the dungeon’s baseline is to speed past the areas that conform to that baseline and instead describe the exciting places.

It is a variation of the same technique I used during the hex crawl exploration of Tomb of Annihilation. Go into detail at the beginning, then pull back and move more to the bits that matter. There is no need to continue in a grinding style of play when such is no longer fun.

Because I was running this game virtually, it was straightforward to reveal a whole set of rooms and say, “These are all more of the living quarters that you explored before”. And, sometimes, “You explore living quarter after living quarter, but as you open this door, you see a steel form crouched in the centre of the room”.

Yes, you lose the feeling of “What is behind this door?” but if there are too many empty rooms, you may lose that anyway!

I felt this while running Cloud Giant’s Bargain, an adventure by Teos “Alphastream” Abadia set on a Cloud Giant’s castle. The opening stages concern you finding clues to the Lord of the Cloud Giants’ actions. Teos, an excellent designer, has various places in which the characters can find these clues.

However, once the players found the clues, further exploration of this dungeon section is unnecessary and risks diluting the excitement of discovering the secrets. The castle has its fair share of “empty” rooms – in this case, they have descriptions – and perhaps monsters – but once the players have found the secrets, they add little more to the story.

So, once the players had solved the mystery, I handwaved the remainder of the exploration and advanced play along to the next section, where the players could find more secrets and apply the knowledge they had gained.

All of this does require some understanding of the structure of the adventure. It is no good fast-forwarding the action when there are still secrets to find, or your players are still enjoying the initial discovery stage of an scenario.

But those are things you learn as you run the game more: the feeling as to what your players are enjoying and when you can skip irrelevant action to get to the next significant bit.

Indeed, when you are running an adventure in a fixed time slot – such as at a convention for the D&D Adventurers League – you have to be very aware of this if you want the action to finish in time. Leaving off the end of an adventure is not a good thing!