Outdoor dungeon

[Lord.Sorasen]

Hi everyone it's me again, asking questions and such.

So here's the situation! I'm dming a new campaign, and I am trying to create the first "dungeon" for them to travel through. My issue is that I felt I had created too many "dungeon underground" scenarios in the previous campaign, and I want to do something different. Specifically? A forest of sorts.

Now, I am really very unfamiliar with the tabletop game (our whole group is but I am theoretically the most dm-y of our little group so it's happening). As such I have often looked to the closest thing I am very familiar with: the video game RPG. Now see, in video games forest dungeons are done by programming things so that you can't just go around a tree. This simply won't do. But I just... I don't know how to make a point A to point B journey feel interesting without walls or easily made visual representation (through graph and walls). So guys, I'm sure you do this sort of thing sometimes. How do you do it?

[Machinekng]

Hi everyone it's me again, asking questions and such.

So here's the situation! I'm dming a new campaign, and I am trying to create the first "dungeon" for them to travel through. My issue is that I felt I had created too many "dungeon underground" scenarios in the previous campaign, and I want to do something different. Specifically? A forest of sorts.

Now, I am really very unfamiliar with the tabletop game (our whole group is but I am theoretically the most dm-y of our little group so it's happening). As such I have often looked to the closest thing I am very familiar with: the video game RPG. Now see, in video games forest dungeons are done by programming things so that you can't just go around a tree. This simply won't do. But I just... I don't know how to make a point A to point B journey feel interesting without walls or easily made visual representation (through graph and walls). So guys, I'm sure you do this sort of thing sometimes. How do you do it?

A hedge maze would work. It'd essentially be a dungeon, except that you could have hippogriff riding orcs, griffions, fiendish giant eagles, and other flying monsters harrass them.

As to lampshade the premise, have the PCs be seeking aid from a fey lady/lord to help stave off a plauge/zombie hoard/invading army. That way, you can have the hedge be around 10-20ft tall, and automatically regenerating.

[gbprime]

Make it a very dense forest, where navigation is only possible by either climbing a really tall tree and looking at a distant landmark, or by following a stream or gully. That second method in particular is much like a path or hallway, and the same principles apply. They have the freedom to leave it, but will likely get hopelessly lost if they do.

[Lord.Sorasen]

A hedge maze would work. It'd essentially be a dungeon, except that you could have hippogriff riding orcs, griffions, fiendish giant eagles, and other flying monsters harrass them.

As to lampshade the premise, have the PCs be seeking aid from a fey lady/lord to help stave off a plauge/zombie hoard/invading army. That way, you can have the hedge be around 10-20ft tall, and automatically regenerating.

Heh, I didn't make myself clear enough at all. I'm not looking for an excuse to make the same thing I always do but in a different place. I want to know how people actually manage to make a point A to point B event interesting rather than simply a railroaded chain of fights. I don't know how much sense that makes.

PS: I placed this in the D&D 3.5 subforum rather than the general roleplaying forum because I'm beginning to realize that a system often has influence over the style of play.

For the record, if it at all matters, it's a party of 4 gestalt level 5 characters. Dread Necro//Warlock, Wild-shape Druid//Factotum, Fire-Shugenja//Knight, paladin//healer.

[Immonen]

The PCs have no idea what the map looks like until they see it. This means that you don't necessarily have to have a map at all. Just have a bunch of encounters lined up. It doesn't matter which way they choose to go, they'll run into the next encounter on the list. They want to turn back and take a different path? They still just move down your list.

[Tvtyrant]

I make a ton of location based event trees, which evolve to the level the party is at. Anyplace you go through is a location on my tree-map with its own problems (problems reset at CR1 when dealt with, so a region is effectively pacified after the party goes through and starts to slowly build new problems if they don't return).

Say you have Mirklandplace. Mirklandplace is a desert with a dry mountain range that has small wet valleys in it. These valleys have a problem with Blood Apes at level 5. If the Blood Apes aren't dealt with they destroy the local villages and gain weapons and armor. By the time the party is level 15 the Blood Apes have built a Ape-City knock off with arcanists, fighters and siege walls.

[TwylyghT]

Well you could do something like the Lost Forest in Zelda where they have to find a specific way to navigate around a magical effect that makes the forest seem endless in all directions once entered. Tripping over signs from that fight 30 minutes ago when you just know you were headed straigh north the whole time.....

Similar in fashion, I had a party teleported onto a demiplane of sorts that actually turned out to be a spherical plane with the forest on the inside and the never moving sun overhead as the "core". Now it turned out only to be a few miles across, and the magical sun was actually quite small, but looked right to us due to the perspective. A magical effect obscured overhead sight to prevent us from looking up and seeing the other side of the sphere until we found a "control room" that could see through the illusion and revealed the situation for what it was. Also a hall with a dozen portals leading to places around our native plane, including, as these things tend to do, the original destination we had been traveling to when we got pulled in.

[marcielle]

You've never played table top games and you're going for gestalt:smalleek:
Brave man.

[Larpus]

Another option is to make a lost city kind of deal, possibly coupled with the maze idea; it can be very enervating to travel across an empty city full of open houses and noises, even more enervating if you happen to know that it is not empty and either don't know what's preventing it from being empty or knows that it is something powerful and/or tricky.

Another possibility is to make a mountain trail, where you can't really go far away from the trail or you fall for your death.

Then there are also valleys and the such, which can have steep mountains as "walls" despite its woods not being particularly tricky.

And last but not least, slap some magic on it! If there is a permanent magical darkness above whatever the dungeon is, then no one can use the sky to locate themselves (thought that can be argued as being the same as being underground), or better yet, have a false sky in that region to throw your players off-track, or make an invisible wall dungeon, never had one of these, but I can imagine it being very interesting if done right (as in, make the walls be some sort of shadows from another dimension and have the PCs have ways to tell where they are once they bump into enough, just to save time), so you create a strange case where they can see very clearly where they need to go, but have no idea how they get there.