Dungeons and Dragons Campaign: any suggestions on stories for underground worlds?

[DungeonMaster11]

Hey everyone, I'm quite new here and was wondering if anybody has any suggestions of beginning stories that have to do with underground dungeons

and if anybody has any good names for dungeons, that would help a lot

Thanks!!

[jiriku]

Welcome to the Playground!

If you're new to the DM's chair and just getting started, the important thing is to start small. First tell a little story well, then move on to bigger things as you grow more confident in your storytelling skills.

If you are very creative, here's a trick that I use. Make a list in three columns:
One column of 5-10 people, each with a distinctive identifying trait.
One column of 5-10 objects or places that are interesting and unusual.
One column of 5-10 activities, which can be whatever you like.

Now, start connecting the dots from column 1, column 2, column 3 in whatever way suits your fancy. You might connect "Livia the baker" with "ancient tome" and "searching", then connect "albino drow queen" with "ruined temple" and "invasion". Then begin to tell a story about how these things interact with one another. For example, Livia the baker, upon learning that the minions of an albino drow queen are invading the nearby ruins of an underground temple, might ask the PCs to search it for an ancient tome which she believes is hidden there. The tome records the ancestry of her family and will prove that she is the last descendant of a noble family, allowing her finally prove her claim of nobility. Of course, if the PCs can't find the tome before the drow arrive in force, then it's lost forever and it's croissants and pastries for poor Livia for the rest of her life.

If freeform story construction isn't something you're comfortable with, look at the adventure ideas on pages 44-45 of the DMG. Most of them will work just fine underground.

Edit: When naming a place, it's useful to turn adjectives in the name into prepositions. This creates a sense of fantasy around the name. For example "forest of dread" sounds better than "dreadful forest", and "mountains of mist" is more evocative than "misty mountains". Putting a personal name into a place name also gives you a chance to work lore into the world. For example, players may want to explore the "ebon tower", but tell them about the "ebon tower of Al'Kazar" and they'll certainly want to know who or what Al'Kazar is.

[atemu1234]

Most things with the underdark would probably fit here.

[DungeonMaster11]

Thanks a lot for the help! I have been DMing for 5 years and have come up with, in my opinion, good stories, so the advice will help a lot with coming up with even better ones. I think the column approach is a good way of doing it. I had a thought about a large underground lake where a decent sized drow city rests. The drow lord has been planning a full on invasion on the above world, and he is gathering all underworld creatures such as umberhulks to him. So now i just need a way of getting the players involved.

[Bloodgruve]

Sounds like you already have a story arc but I've always wanted to run a 'The Sky is Falling' Underdark campaign. Tremors causing massive cave-ins, entire underdark cities getting smooshed, etc... Maybe some high level surface wizards are moving around the moons or something like that causing the earth quakes. Or boiling hot lava is filing in some of the lower regions or something, forcing the nastier stuff to rise with it.. Maybe the underdwellers have to band together for an all out assault on the surface?

GL
Blood~

[Flickerdart]

Thanks a lot for the help! I have been DMing for 5 years and have come up with, in my opinion, good stories, so the advice will help a lot with coming up with even better ones. I think the column approach is a good way of doing it. I had a thought about a large underground lake where a decent sized drow city rests. The drow lord has been planning a full on invasion on the above world, and he is gathering all underworld creatures such as umberhulks to him. So now i just need a way of getting the players involved.
Clearly you've got a solid grasp on story, so I'm going to address the "underground" part of your question.

Take your plot, cross out every instance of "underground" and replace "aboveground" with "neighbouring kingdom." Then look at the plot again. Does it make sense? Yes? Then it's not an underground world, just a regular world with a palette swap.

I would start your brainstorming with what an underground setting actually has to offer that's unique, and spin things out from there. Some thoughts:

Underground environments are hostile for aboveground creatures, and vice-versa, leading to complications for any colonizing population. This ties in with your plot idea - why is the drow lord (surely you mean matriatch, though) invading a place where the sun burns his subjects and minions? It may be more interesting to set the plot after the invasion, when the drow have captured some land. How do they convert it to make it comfortable for themselves? Do they actually live there, or just skim produce off the local farmers? Do they build a lot of buildings to hide inside during daytime? How do the surface-dwellers use their natural advantages to fight them?
What if you reversed the situation, and had a surface dweller colony established underground and besieged by all of these subterranean creatures?
Underground, the firmament is literally a solid surface. Perhaps a species of bat-like creatures have established cities on the roofs of caverns, and routinely engage in warfare with their enemies below, the drow. This should give you a good number of really cool and unexpected maps, and your players will have to think fast about how to fight in spaces like that.
Space is at a premium underground. Depending on how your drow raise food (since farming or raising grazing animals aren't really options) you may have some interesting consequences that shape the setting. These cramped spaces also mean that armies aren't really a thing. Perhaps the drow instead have a small number of elite adventurers, who will attack the surface world through infiltration and mind control/subjugation of the locals? This would make an excellent excuse for themed boss battles.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

Mechanically, think about what setting your game underground is going to mean.

Vision. Light. Cover. The necessity of a z-axis in even low-level combat. Space. Movement modes. Ranged weapons. These are all things that are going to work radically differently in an underground campaign than an above-ground one. And that's a huge advantage in making your game look and feel unique.

So ask yourself how you're going to utilize the underground setting to make it a memorable experience. If you aren't going to utilize the setting, then... well, then you just tell the story you want to tell, exactly as if it were Human Kingdom A and Human Kingdom B. There's certainly no shame in doing that.

[Afgncaap5]

Are you familiar with the Zork universe, out of curiosity? Zork's secondary name is "The Great Underground Empire", and it focused a lot on a massive underground world. Basically, someone conquered the world and instead of weeping like Alexander did he just started digging down to make more worlds to conquer.

I think Zork's worth a mention because while there's an overabundance of comedy in it, the game world actually takes a good look at all the considerations behind massive underground locations. Entire sub-cultures of construction workers and delivery people existed to trek through the (often uncharted) expanses of natural caverns and constructed cathedrals. One of the mechanics of the first three games in the series involved a dwindling light source; not only would your lantern extinguishing make it impossible to explore effectively, but it would also make you vulnerable to Grues, the monsters that inhabited the dark places of the earth. While I don't know if that kind of consideration would be good to force your players to consider all the time, I do think focusing on those elements of underground travel occasionally are well worth the effort.