Uncle Gary's Dungeon Maps

I'm pretty sure I swiped this graphic from an old thread on the EN World. I can't remember for certain who posted it. Was it Melan, maybe? That cat is cool. Anyhoo, this is purportedly a pic of some Gygax-penned levels from his Castle Greyhawk dungeon.

Observations:

• Holy crap, but that man knows how to fill a page! Assuming one was mapping with the same size graph paper, it would be easy to figure out where additional rooms might be located. One could zero in on hypothetical secret doors this way. My own dungeons tend to be designed to allow the same sort of deduction.


• Relatively few areas are numbered for reference to a key. That suggests a lot of empty rooms and more reliance on wandering monsters for encounters. This map lines up nicely with the standard 1 in 6 per turn wandering monster check. That's a huge amount of encounters with wandering monsters, if you think about it. You're likely to encounter a random critter every hour your party is in the dungeon.