Like I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been running Benoist and Ernie's HSD0: Marmoreal Tomb of Garm Patu'ul (as seen in Gygax #3).

We're three months and five sessions into a very nice, almost archetypal low-level dungeon crawl; dwarven ruins, fabled treasure, goblins, an ogre, plus a few surprises. After an initial "culture shock" in which a 2e-raised and 3.5e-inured band of players drove seven characters inside the dungeon and had only two come out alive, they adapted rather quickly to the idea that you don't have to "clear" a dungeon in one go, and more or less intuitively adopted old school SOPs like having a caller and a mapper. They've been making forays interspersed with trips to the nearest (two days' worth of travel on foot) outpost of civilization.

Here are some of the things they've done (possible spoilers ahead):

Spoiler

• Killed the ogre in area 4, and found Belenor's enchanted helm... and lost it when its reckless Dwarf wearer charged into the darkness upon hearing kobolds chatter, only to be pelted to death by sling fire before reaching the end of the hallway.


• The thief was creeped out as fuck by the ghost of Belenor's wife.


• Survived several encounters by judiciously applying sleep.
  
  
• Got slaughtered by kobolds, stirges and the spider behind the waterfall.


• Met Obmar Nohj, the dwarf survivor gone crazy.


• Faced off against the giant centipede in the beer-hall, and when it ran away with the fighter's shield to hide inside its hole in one of the big wooden pillars, flushed it out of the hole with smoke, whacked it in the head and got the shield back.


• Killed two dozen goblins in area 21 with flaming oil, and also used flaming oil to create "chokepoints" the better to pick off the survivors with missile fire. Also killed the goblin Field-Marshal but didn't find the chess set.


• Hauled a giant slab of celadon marble out of the dungeon, at great effort, believing it was sapphire (they're going to be very disappointed next session).
  

Because I wanted a dungeon-centric game, I kept the town intentionally sketchy and deprived of detail. I only named it last session and it's entirely possible that I haven't been doing the exact same voice for the aged but spry innkeep.

The thing is. Dungeon crawling for five sessions straight in the same dungeon, no matter how cool the dungeon, gets old. And even a bit frustrating when the players seem at a loss to find the Big Macguffin they're searching inside a dungeon that's honestly not that big (for old school standards anyway). At least for me, the DM; the players don't seem to be complaining.

The solution, I guess, would be to throw them some adventure hooks outside the dungeon, and hope they take them on their next sojourn to civilization. Or, alternatively, to introduce new elements to the dungeon (e.g. new monster moves in to fulfill the niche left by the big baddies they killed).

Thoughts?

OK First I'm glad the group got past its initial cultural shock. That's very cool. Running an environment like this has its own learning curve, and a lot of that learning curve depends on the particular group and what the players like and do not like and what pace they want in the game and so on, no question about it.

Now some thoughts I posted on your similar post on G+:

Several elements are key here, I think.

First. Inside the dungeon, no one delve ideally feels the same. Whether it's the areas being explored that vary in tone and ambiance, the type of enemies, whether they organize themselves in between the party's forays, there should be diversity in the dungeon both from a module standpoint and from a game-play-as-it-happens standpoint. Part of it is therefore the responsibility of the guy who comes up with the adventure setting in the setting, and part of it comes down to DMing the thing for real at the table.

Second. The trips in between the town and the dungeon should come with their own threats and rewards. That means random wandering encounters in the wilderness, maybe improvising a lair for whatever's encountered, a ruined tower, a hollowed tree the things are coming from, whatever. These in turn might transmute during the course of the adventure into actual hooks, e.g. if you roll a bunch of bandits say, improvise a bunch of prisoners they have with them, then you have several questions to answer right then and there in your head, like where they are coming from, where they are headed to, who the prisoners are, etc. The party just catches on that and sometimes generates its own adventures, which you should let unfold organically, like say, they want to bring back that young boy to the village, and then find the village as it's been attacked by the bandits, and how they are in trouble because the goblins nearby are going to try to take over, or whatever else.

Third, the home base or town shouldn't be static. It doesn't necessarily mean that all of a sudden you'll run some town adventures to the detriment of the dungeon, but if the group wants a change of pace, they should have something to look forward to, some NPCs to interact with, some stuff to wonder about and maybe investigate further, which might or might not lead back to some dungeon crawling later on.

So basically it's a combination of judicious preparation of the environment with an eye towards choice and diversity for the group (at least potentially so), DMing the milieu and not being afraid to follow the party as it takes the adventure into its own hands and leads it into a direction you did not foresee, and make sure the environment reacts dynamically and doesn't remain static as the party starts to make its mark upon it.