soon to be DM of the Worlds Largest Dungeon: preperations

[littlebottom]

I (perhaps somewhat foolishly) accepted a challenge to run Worlds Largest dungeon.

I mentioned this before a couple of months ago some may, but proberbly wont remember. either way, i am now soon to run, 2 or 3 weeks with any luck.

For those who dont know, i have not DMed D&D at all before, but i have DMed a few other systems now and then. i am relatively new as a GM having only ran 5 or so adventures of varying length. and running 3.5 will be an interesting challenge i think. Either way, Im making this thread because i need suggestions.

I have a couple of questions to start off, one: What should i use for battle maps? we have some 3D dungeon terrain i would LOVE to use, but obviously thats a big hassle all the small individual pieces and proberbly only enough to make a few rooms and coridoors at a time, then reording them would take time, so i MAY use them for special fights by making the areas ahead of time, but other than that, generally speaking what should i do? We have some map tiles that we could use from varying games, some that clip togeather that make good corridors and such, and others like the actual D&D ones would work still with some fuss and time wasted changing to new areas. or my other thought was to buy a squared grided mat that i can draw on and rub off easily, obviously the best idea for practicality, but not the best idea for player excitement. i may do that just with scenery pieces like little tables and stuff, that could work right? suggestions welcome.

Two: The worlds LARGEST dungeon is... well LARGE, and as such, i would like to get to the end (if we get there) and not feel "well, thats it then." after the initial achievement wears off. as such i would like to somehow keep records of our adventure, one idea i had was get a player to write an in character journal throughout the dungeon, and if his character died, his next character could just read the old journal and feel inspired to finish his work. giving us a multi volume journal of the entire adventure from a characters point of view. another idea was just to post summaries of what happens each session here on giant, and proberbly at the end turn it into some kind of... book thing and give them out to the players to remember the adventure. a friend also suggested recording the sessions with a tape player, and then editing it down to a podcasty type thing, which i personally think is a cool idea, not sure what the players think about that yet though. i wouldnt know how much information to keep in them though, cut out unimportant combats? cut all of the out of game chatter? or keep it in for the fun? is this even a good idea or a waste of time and resources? (i would have to buy some kind of tape recorder with proberbly a lot of memory to record several hours sessions.) again, suggestions welcome.

any other ideas for what to do and get ready before we begin are welcome too!

EDIT: Another idea i had for the battle maps was a good idea if somewhat difficult/expensive to execute, Take the poster map, scan it, blow it up so that the scale is correct, and make large laminated map areas, simple, and effective in game, costly and awkward out of game, it would proberbly be laminated sheets of A3 or A2 paper, but yeah i dont have a printer for those, and laminating it is something i am not sure where i could go to get it done, and obviously how much it would cost.

[panaikhan]

I've been running the WLD myself.
Read the thing front to back at LEAST once. Make notes.
Some of the stuff just doesn't add up, be prepared to improvise.

We use the wipe-clean dry-marker grid sheets for most of our combats.

If you are advising your group on classes - they need a thief. A straight thief with maxed out search and disarm. And even THEN traps will still get them.
The party need to be prepared for months of self-sufficiency (they're not getting out any time soon).

[Tyndmyr]

Make sure the players are duly warned of what's ahead.

Ignore most of the customization instructions in the book. Explaining why to the PCs why they can't have web, when the designers put it in the spellbook of the NPC in the frigging dungeon, is...awkward.

[Saph]

Honestly, I'd be happy if our DM had followed that particular bit of advice for our run-through. With the amount of choke points in the WLD web slows combats down like you wouldn't believe.

The self-sufficiency aspect of the WLD can actually be a lot of fun if you have the kind of group who get into that sort of thing. It feels a lot more like real exploration rather than day-tripping. :)

[Kaveman26]

I don't recall all the details behind WLD but I think my experience in attempting to run it differs from most. I had a player that quite frankly was much smarter than me in terms of stretching the rules and perceptions of how the game is played.

Advice:

*Be leery of summoning spells and how they function...i have a post on the Funny D&D stories about our wizard abusing the rules for summoning in a very amusing fashion.

*Be leery of spells like Stone Shape that can alter the architecture of the dungeon. There is some fine print on this somewhere in there, but my same wizard got very creative with Lyre of Building, Stone Shape, Transmute Rock to Mud and a few other spells. He treated it less like a dungeon crawl and more like a redesigning of his new lair.

*If you have players that will spend each spare minute searching for secret doors and every scrap of loot/treasure they can find you are in for a long haul.

* I tried to map out the whole complex on graph paper...dont try, way too much work. Use an erasable board as someone mentioned.

[panaikhan]

Things I did:

The sponsoring council that sent the party in the first place, gave them an Eternal Wand of Create Food & Drink, and an Eternal Wand of Cure Light Wounds. Very useful at low levels, but not game-breaking.

Summons didn't work. period.

All translocation spells were limited to line-of-sight.

[littlebottom]

the point you make about summons, would it not be possible to say allow a summon spell to "summon" without summoning, like, making a ghostly apperition of the thing they are summoning appear to stay with them for a limited time?:smallconfused:

im still debating whether to make a fuss of food and water, and light. i might do to begin with, and lay off it deeper in the dungeon to get across the feeling of being trapped and running low on supplies.

and i would only allow teleporty sorts of spells work in line of sight or perhaps a short X distance, or perhaps even just put in a chance of it randomly messing up where you end up the further you are teleporting because of all the residual wards kicking in and mucking up the trajectory of the teleport (so if someone tries to be clever i can punish them humoursly)

[Gavinfoxx]

Ignore most of the houserules for the dungeon... here are some questions I give everyone who is thinking of playing in the game to ask the DMs. You should consider the possible answers to them, and tell the players the answers up front!

1.) For characters that can invest resources in 'burrowing', 'earthgliding', and 'burrowing through stone' (there are several ways to do this, including Wild Shaping into a Thoqqua, for example, which specifically also leaves a usable tunnnel...), are the use of their abilities nerfed? IE, are inner room walls impervious as *well as* the obviously impervious outer walls? IE, will player characters sometimes be able to scout or bypass rooms in this way?

2.) For characters who invest in being able to do things with crafting materials, will the DM be using the standard lack of crafting supplies in this dungeon? Or will supplies be found, or will you be able to convert GP value in items to generic crafting supplies at a particular ratio with a particular amount of time?

3.) For characters who can replace animal companions or such things via summoning them, either a few times a day or via a 24 hour ritual, will those abilities work as advertised? What if characters want to release your existing animal companion and summon a new one? What about the magical paladin pokeball-mounts? Will those work normally?

4.) For characters that invest in short range teleports, or becoming etherial, or things like that, do those work as advertised? At least for interior areas?

5.) For characters that expect to be able to Take 10 or Take 20 on skills, do those work as in the PHB?

6.) For characters that invest in having access to, say, an Extended Rope Trick at level 5, does that work as advertised, to get access to a safe space? What are your rulings on Extradimensional or nondimensional spaces working in the dungeon? What if a Wizard wants to actually scribe scrolls, will the DM be handwaving the exotic inks necessary to do so? Maybe just subtract a GP worth of value of loot to do this? What if an Easy Bake Wizard (it's a named build using a few combinations of techniques) wants to spend some time scribing scrolls to his brain by burning incenses, will those be placed as treasure?

7.) Will the DM be making intelligent adjustments to the 'security' of rooms or wandering monster based issues based on intelligent barricading techniques? Will the DM be enforcing the 'most locations are very dangerous and have hourly wandering monster rolls' rule? What if the party attempts to barricade themselves in one of the rooms that is NOT specifically marked as an obvious saferoom?

8.) Will the DM be changing the treasure of the module? Most of the treasure of the module is supposedly completely useless -- ie, 'art', or 'not equipment' sorts of things, or things that doesn't actually HELP, or things too large to be taken, and thus doesn't actually help the party. Alternately, is the DM relaxing the restrictions on the feat 'Ancestral Relic', ie, it's the only real way to appropriately sacrifice the crappy treasure (like a huge amount of material you can't change to useful gear because it's too big) to make useful equipment, maybe give it out as a bonus feat or not make it 'good aligned only'? Is this feat suggested or appropriate for this particular campaign of World's Largest Dungeon?

9.) The module suggests completely banning the entire category of 'battlefield control' spells from the game, and mentions that they will not be placed in the game. Typically, a few pages later, a Web scroll is given out as treasure. Are there any house rules on battlefield control spells?

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The main thing I noticed is that the game is absolutely horribly, TERRIBLY written, and appears to be one of the most mind bogglingly boring, inane modules ever. All the interesting places are specifically those that are HARD to find. The place makes no sense, even given the backstory. The combat encounters are not interesting, are repetitive, and boring. The entire thing could be condensed immensely. You could bypass maybe 90% of the area with the party coming up with intelligent heuristics on searches and where to search and what to search and how, and the DM running the party on autopilot until they come up against something INTERESTING. The game doesn't reward creativity on the roleplayers. It gives no impetus for anyone to CARE about the metaplot of any of the areas. It gives no useful treasure. In other words... the module SUCKS, in such a profound way it is hard to put in words. I'd be happy if you just arbitrarily hand waved all the exploration, and put all the interesting rooms in linear order without even trying to lay them out as a maze, and assuming people make their checks to find interesting rooms... This dungeon isn't large because it has interesting or noteworthy places. It is large because it has an excessive amount of padding and repetition, like the worst kind of video games...

[Dr_S]

this is just a general idea for a map where you may be needing to redraw rooms every so often, we found that it was actually a lot easier to use shiskabob sticks for the walls, and then would rearrange them because it was a lot faster, and standard smallish house hold objects for things inside the room. I.e. usually someone was drinking a soda, so their bottle cap might represent a pillar.

Especially for large rooms with details, using things you can physically move tends to be a lot faster than redrawing.

[littlebottom]

*SNIP*

Well with most of those questions common sense dictates the answer, depending on logic, and context. other ones like the giving resources to people who can say, blacksmith is a good point. ill just add a bunch of anvils and forges in empty rooms every so often, i mean, these things have been here so long that they surely had to repair their equipment at some point right? and so forth.

as for it being boring, well you may be right it as written is boring, which is why im sure ill be adding a hell of a lot more about the plots of each area to make them feel more like they are doing something, i mean even reading region A, talks about an interesting 3 sided battle, but reading through most of the rooms will show that the players unless haphazardly happen upon certain rooms (that are not even in choke points to make it near impossible to miss) they dont get much of the plot and blindly dungeon crawl through accidently into region B or E before they have even explored 1/8th of region A just because of the direction they went, so that will be dealt with apropriately, most likely by subtle nudging and GM screwery ("no there is no secret door in this room that leads to the next region that you can find" "you have helped resolve the conflict in this area, shortly after doing so, there is a tremor that causes part of a wall to crumble revealing a passageway beyond")

maybe that makes me cruel, maybe that makes me a bad GM, but i see no point in letting level 1s or 2s accidently walk into an area for level 7s. or rushing them up levels to compensate. I want them to enjoy it, and a dungeon crawl is going to get old fast, so there may end up being more than a few NPCs added in that are not existant in the book.

hell im thinking of having an NPC shop network "but why do you have a shop in the middle of this dungeon?" "because theres a lot of treasure and not much to do with it, so we needed an economy, so the celestials that remained designated safe rooms for shops to be made to increase survivablity of the poor souls who have got trapped in here, i mean, once your in, you cant get out, might as well try and make a living" hopefully that doesnt break the game, and doesnt upset the setting. and of course these shops will have limited stock of things, IE: i wont allow items that couldnt pheasably have been found or made or brought into the dungeon (or dont want the PCs to have, like certain spells)

ill just take them from region to region, after they clear it or atleast mostly clear it depending on the actual region, some might require the players come back later or something, but only when theyve done a decent amount can they move on, and they can go whatever way they want, so they can go through ALL of the regions if they truely wanted, but i doubt that, im suspecting a somewhat zigzag pattern, im hoping they go to one of the other corners myself.

[Kyouhen]

First things first, excellent work littlebottom! Don't take the module at face value, that's never fun. Tweak it to suit your style and needs and it'll be much more enjoyable for everyone!

As for the previous points:

I'm personally really fond of the suggestion the book makes for summoning spells. The spell still summons the creatures as normal, but is incapable of putting them back when it's done. This could cause some small problems if the player is fond of summoning nongood creatures. If they manage to convince/force the creature to continue serving them after the control granted by the spell wears off, just remember that a larger party is going to have a harder time covering it's tracks and keeping quiet. They should expect to draw a lot of unwanted attention if they start running around with a small army. :smallamused:

Absolutely make a fuss of food and water. The players aren't the only things in that dungeon, so if they manage to make some friends they can always get some supplies from them. It'll give your players a reason to be a little more resourceful when they realize they're running out of food and probably shouldn't have wiped out that orc encampment a few days ago. :smallamused:

Personally I'd let teleportation spells work based on what region they're in. Most of the time they'll never work for moving between regions. If a region happens to be one of the ones filled with demons, or at some point in the past held a powerful demon, there should be no teleporting period.

It helps if one of your players decides to attempt to map out the dungeon in-character. Then you just draw a few rooms on an erasable map and let them try to keep track of where everything is.

As for ways to keep it interesting, a good party tends to help with that. Two of mine have immediately taken to the lack of loot, harvesting bones/teeth/tables/nails and using them to build a wide variety of clever traps to help protect themselves while they rest. And remember, not everything in the dungeon needs to try killing the players. If they seem to be stuck and/or refusing to move on to a story-critical location feel free to have a patrol of [x] take them captive and demand to know why they're there. Hopefully when the enemies that just walked around the corner start trying to give the players orders they'll decide to try communicating with them instead of just murdering them.

Your idea for the shop network is a good one, but remember the backstory for the dungeon. Celestials trying to help people who get stuck down there won't work because nobody's supposed to be able to find the dungeon. I'd suggest having it more of an armoury for the Celestials that worked in the garrison. They're willing to trade some supplies to the PCs for some collateral and a promise to use it to fix the problems in the dungeon. The players are expected to return the equipment when they're done (though that's up to them) at which point the valuables they traded for collateral will be returned to them. They still get the items they're after for market value without making it look like this is a random shop sitting in the middle of a long-forgotten dungeon.

[Gavinfoxx]

EDIT: Sorry about the bump. Got this mixed up with another thread. Again, sorry!


Common sense dictates the answer to those questions? Really?

So common sense says whether or not you are applying the badly thought-out house rules in the module or not? Really?

Okay okay... I'm going to try and guess if you are applying the houserules the module suggests, your own, or none whatsoever...


Nope. I got nothing. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't. I don't know you as a DM. Some dm's I know would promptly throw out most of the suggested houserules in that book and call that 'common sense'. Others would take the rules in the book to heart and call that 'common sense'. Thus, I would make all of this stuff explicitly clear before players start building characters, especially stuff regarding items, custom houserules, obtaining bonus spells, changes in how skills work (like does the Druid get access to Wild Shape forms, improvements to her Knowledge Nature skill and the associated implications of that knowledge and Summon Nature's Ally summons and Animal Companions via her connection to nature and meditating and stuff, or is she nerfed like the book says, with the excuse of 'you have to study outside of levelling, so you can't get this stuff that you have never seen', which completely ignores the fact that they commune with nature for one hour every 24 hours in a mystical ritual?) bonus feats, and other stuff.

Also, for any discussion on this module, it would help if you spell out exactly WHICH houserules you are or are not using.

AND OH MY GOD. Someone is suggesting to fuss for food and water for this module? The one with no ecosystem, which is explicitly called out as sustaining the inhabitants? That is the ONE 'gimme' that this module has! Don't take away that gimme!

[littlebottom]

hehe, the bump is fine, yeah the threads a bit old now i guess, but whatever whats done is done.

that said, i actually have started running this game. and yeah your right, different people would see "common sense" differently personally, common sense in this case would come down to "take in the variables, where are they, what region, whats going on" and so on, and make a compramise, as for the general house rules so far not many have been an issue yet, no teleportation has come up yet, and i had a word with the players at the start about some of these problems, for example, i said that teleportation might flat out not work in some places, it might work to a degree in others, but the further you teleport the more likely it will go wrong. (which basically means, no they cant teleport from region to region, and anything they attempt i will look at and decide how it goes, it might work, it might send them somewhere else by accident, it might not work at all, depends what they are trying to achieve)

so far the players seem to be genuinely enjoying the game, but one of them is about to go on holiday for 3 weeks so we said we will take a break till he gets back, just gives me more time to prepare, mwahahahahaaa