Exploring The Logistics of a Mega Dungeon

[Ice]

I have been struggling with the concept of a mega dungeon and exploration. My group and me as well don’t find the act of explaining every twist and turn in a mega dungeon entertaining. I want the dungeon to be huge. would it presumptuous of me to design the key features of the dungeon and have the party explore part of it at a time.

For Example:
DM: So what direction would you like to explore today?
Players: let’s explore the west part today.
DM: ok, so you wander around the tunnels for a couple days and eventually you stumble upon a strange arced doorway engraved in the stone.

Would something like that get the vastness of the dungeon across without me having to plan out massive portion of the dungeon and many boring passages/rooms. I could even have them describe what they are looking for in a safe place to rest for the night.

On the same note if I want to put a bunch of traps (not so dangerous) could I ask them how they want to go about exploring. If they want to be careful more time could pass as they disable the traps. Eventually they get to the same destination. If they choose not to be careful maybe they would take some damage but end up at the destination quicker.

One way to make this more exciting perhaps is by rolling for a random encounter or just putting in an encounter based on the direction they go that would set the stage for the key feature in that direction.

The down side to doing something along these lines would be if they do stumble upon a more dangerous trap and i describe the specifics of a room the players will immediately know something is up. I find this to be a negative as then they are more cautious and change the way they play/act to mirror the fact that i suddenly described a actually room or object in the dungeon.

Are their ideas or models that you have used that might help me out?


Cheers, Ice

[Sabeta]

http://i1.wp.com/theangrygm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Megadungeon-Map.png

The "Days" by the way aren't Adventuring Days. Those are entire sessions worth of exploration. The goal is to try and constantly introduce and resolve minor story beats with each session as you explore, which in turn unlocks a new section of the dungeon. I didn't make these by the way, they're AngryGMs (I'll link it at the end of the post), but here's how the first few days go.

Day 1: Deal with a Kobold Menace, Resolve it.
Day 2: If they try to go Day 3, the Tunnel collapses. If they try to go to Day 4, the Floor collapses. At the end of Day 2 they get a key that leads them to Day 3
Day 3: They finally get back to the area covered in Day 1. They can now proceed safely to Day 4
Day 4: Also includes Day 5 because 4 doesn't have a story. This is where you finally reveal the scope of the place and show them how big it is.
Day 5: There's a major plot beat here. They beat the dungeons first major boss battle. In Angry GMs case it was a plant monster
Days 6-Infinity: Defeating the plant monster destroyed the vines hiding several passage ways. The players are now free to explore at their leisure, and different stories await them at every turn
Day End: All of the various stories are slowly revealed to be connected, which eventually leads to a BBEG they must defeat.

My incredibly brief synopsis doesn't really do a megadungeon justice, so here's the Angry GM article.
http://theangrygm.com/a-tale-of-two-maps-1/

To address a major concern: Don't speed things up and then slow them back down. You don't need to show off the whole dungeon at once to show them the scale of it (it'll have the opposite effect). Try to keep the pace consistent, and only speed things along whenever they would be required to backtrack. If your players won't care about the elven architecture don't worry about it. One way that I like to quickly establish a megadungeon is with a forest. Crystals produce a sky-blue light which allows an entire forest to grow inside the dungeon. That REALLY sets the scale of it all. Also consider putting volcanos or biomes inside the place. The players WILL care if there's lava everywhere one day, and then a few sessions later the stumble upon a beach, and it's all supposedly underground.

You are right however. If you simply allow the players to zoom through the dungeon until they hit an encounter then it's not really a megadungeon anymore. Here's another cool way to look at it. Treat your Megadungeon as if you were writing a completely normal campaign. Perhaps throw in towns, people to meet, stories to do, etcetera. Just make sure that it's all Inside of something (a really big tree, the bottom of a whirlpool, a cave, a mountain, etcetera) and then constantly remind them that "wow there's an entire dwarven city inside this one dungeon"

He has a whole series on the stuff, but to be honest most of its a little too much to digest in one sitting. Good luck.

[SillyPopeNachos]

Many dungeons have evolved into entire campaign settings, so the prior advice is good. Don't be afraid to throw quirky details into the empty rooms, for example in a 1e source book (forget which one), there was a picture of water flowing through mid-air in and turning at a 90 degree angle, as though through an invisible pipe. The players may or may not be able to interact with the pipe, just try to fill the 3 core aspects of d&d in your mega-dungeon. Every room is exploration, sure, but what sets one apart from the rest? Some will have combat encounters, and some can have social interaction with non-hostile NPCs. Also, it's good to utilize different skill checks for further exploration, such as acrobatics to reach certain platforms, investigation to find hidden doors, survival to find edible mushrooms, etc. Mega-dungeons require much more attention to detail and active imagination of the DM than standard campaigns.

[mephnick]

Angry has something for this as well. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I've used it myself because mapping out giant dungeons is dull as hell to me, though I like having them in the world.

http://angrydm.com/2013/01/abstract-dungeoneering/

[Tanarii]

IMO doing that entirely misses one of the most important aspects of a megadungeon: without accurate mapping by the players they're dead. This is why so many megadungeon have not only twisting confused mazes of passageways. And many actually change between sessions, or even more lethally behind the players.

Two other critical aspects are: timekeeping; awareness of depletion of resources and accurately estimatimating how far they can go in and make it back.

Also, if you're not using wandering monsters over time, you remove player incentives in a megadungeon: don't waste time! Get in & out before you run out of resources!

All that said, if you're interest in a fresh take on megadungeons' I highly recommend reading Angry DMs blog on creating his megadungeon:
http://theangrygm.com/category/megadungeon/

[mephnick]

IMO doing that entirely misses one of the most important aspects of a megadungeon: without accurate mapping by the players they're dead. This is why so many megadungeon have not only twisting confused mazes of passageways. And many actually change between sessions, or even more lethally behind the players.

OP says they don't find that aspect of mega-dungeons entertaining. You can still have wandering monsters in a more abstracted system, just set a certain amount of checks between each point. Kind of like Darkest Dungeon. You can try and head to the next key area, but there's going to be 8 encounter checks between them and you can't be sure when an encounter will hit. It still provides decision points.

[DragonBaneDM]

I have been struggling with the concept of a mega dungeon and exploration. My group and me as well don’t find the act of explaining every twist and turn in a mega dungeon entertaining. I want the dungeon to be huge. would it presumptuous of me to design the key features of the dungeon and have the party explore part of it at a time.

For Example:
DM: So what direction would you like to explore today?
Players: let’s explore the west part today.
DM: ok, so you wander around the tunnels for a couple days and eventually you stumble upon a strange arced doorway engraved in the stone.

Would something like that get the vastness of the dungeon across without me having to plan out massive portion of the dungeon and many boring passages/rooms. I could even have them describe what they are looking for in a safe place to rest for the night.

On the same note if I want to put a bunch of traps (not so dangerous) could I ask them how they want to go about exploring. If they want to be careful more time could pass as they disable the traps. Eventually they get to the same destination. If they choose not to be careful maybe they would take some damage but end up at the destination quicker.

One way to make this more exciting perhaps is by rolling for a random encounter or just putting in an encounter based on the direction they go that would set the stage for the key feature in that direction.

The down side to doing something along these lines would be if they do stumble upon a more dangerous trap and i describe the specifics of a room the players will immediately know something is up. I find this to be a negative as then they are more cautious and change the way they play/act to mirror the fact that i suddenly described a actually room or object in the dungeon.

Are their ideas or models that you have used that might help me out?


Cheers, Ice

Hey! I'm running a MegaDungeon game alongside some other rotating DMs and a few dozen players that flow in and out with a core group of about six. It's really dang fun. Just like you, my group didn't want to get hung up on every twist and turn, but we resolved it in a different way than description of travel: We shrunk the dungeon.

We play on roll20, so maintaining maps of JUST things that have cool stuff in it hasn't been tough. Each of the wings of the dungeon has it own little theme and is built as it's own adventure. "Kobold Hall", "Crypt of the Micromanager" and "Undertown" have been some of our most memorable ones. Whenever the group heads back into Megadungeon, they pick wings to check out that they've already been through until they find something that's changed.

They've found walls have been mined away by invading monsters trying to take over an old wing, a wing may have shifted into the Shadowfell or Feywild (I've only done this once, it was honestly a cop out so I didn't have to make a new map). The end result is that our MegaDungeon is about 5 wings at this point, with 5-10 rooms in each, so it's not overwhelmingly huge, but it still feels really impressive when I map the whole thing out, and someday it might get to the "miles large in every direction" level.

What's your medium of play? I'll admit, roll20 is convenient because I don't have to wipe away my battle maps after every combat, but when it comes to putting the dang thing on graph paper I kind of wish I had just graphed it in the first place, then be able to make that map public knowledge once the party clears the wing.

[Corsair14]

I love mega-dungeons. The granddaddy of them all was Undermountain. Two boxed sets of dungeon, so big there was even a dark "Tortuga"-like city on level 3 and funny enough, restrooms with portals leading to Otyugh pits conveniently located all over the place.

It had quick reference cards for random descriptions of rooms, environmental effects, noises etc along with several for traps found along the way. More importantly it had the encounter tables, plus encounter tables for when you caused noise fighting the first encounter tables. Each map sheet was two foot tall by 3 feet wide with standard grid squares. The first three levels were one map sheet, I think the next three were two sheets. You literally could make an entire 3-epic campaign of just this dungeon.

3rd edition brought us mega-dungeon. A huge book detailing a new generic dungeon. Had some neat twists on making even easy creatures like kobolds challenging.

As far as running them:
Bring up noise and light attract monsters or simply let them figure that out on their own.
Hope someone has underground survival so they know what they can burn to cook things on.
Limited resources, you only have what you brought with you, ammo is generally gone once used, I would give a 25% chance of gleaning bolts and arrows from the dead.
Figure out a way to add an element of fear and the unknown, keep players on their toes. Is that a simple mushroom on the side of the tunnel or is it some kind of explosive trigger?

No matter how descriptive you get, it will start to get monotonous unless they are a hard core hack and slash group. Character deaths happen often in the Undermountain campaign I ran but then I always have the philosophy of unless there is an ulterior motive, its not a good fight without half the party lying on the ground unconscious or worse at the end.

[Tanarii]

OP says they don't find that aspect of mega-dungeons entertaining. You can still have wandering monsters in a more abstracted system, just set a certain amount of checks between each point. Kind of like Darkest Dungeon. You can try and head to the next key area, but there's going to be 8 encounter checks between them and you can't be sure when an encounter will hit. It still provides decision points.
Yup. That's why I posted the link to Angry's Megadungeon, same as you did you ninja! His design philosophy is completely different from "PCs strive not to get lost and lose all their resources" survival-style exploration. I like that style ... but I also love his alternative.

[NichG]

I've never really quite been satisfied with my attempts at megadungeons, but one idea that feels right to me is that to capture the sense of scale, 'being somewhere' in the megadungeon should really be a persistent, significant state. However, to get the abstraction level right, rather than running the gory details needed to make it hard to move throughout the dungeon, it seems like it'd be better to make something like a system of costs for moving around at the abstract level.

For example, there might be a number of locations in the megadungeon: 'The Forge', 'Inverted Mountain', 'Vale of Bones', 'Marsh of Forgetfulness', 'The Corridor', etc. Those locations each have a 'local' view - specific tunnels or rooms or what-not, as called for. However, they also connect to each-other a certain way at the global scale: The Forge and Marsh of Forgetfulness connect to the Corridor, which you can get to from town; on the other side of the Marsh is Inverted Mountain, past which is the Vale of Bones, etc. Discovery of secret passages, teleporters, etc would change that global connectivity. Passing through an area on the way to another area is just abstracted away at some kind of fixed resource cost - one which could be modified by actions taken at the local scale (clearing out threats, making a forward base, etc).

Then, if the PCs say 'we want to go to the Inverted Mountain', rather than running them through the details of corridors and passages and random encounters and such, you say: 'okay, that means you each mark off 10% of your HP or equivalent healing for passing through the Corridor and getting into some scrapes with the patrols, and your effective carry cap is reduced by half for passing through the Marsh, unless you want to risk a random roll for item loss'.

The idea of the costs is to encourage PCs to keep their operations in one area, to reinforce the idea that the dungeon is huge and that the entire thing can't be taken in at one pass. It also rewards development and alteration of the dungeon - its not just a place you pass through for a single goal, its a place you have to tame and make your own in order retain enough strength to pass deeper.

I guess one of the key points about something like this is, you want to balance 'the PCs feel like they understand this environment' against the usual situation of 'by the time you understand the dungeon, you can go directly to the end/finish it'. There should be some sense in which the players can make extended plans like: 'okay, our final goal is the Spawning Pit, but if we want to get there we're going to need to clear out the Mavin Deeps and the Fallen College, so that the tunnel crew can work without being attacked by undead and open up the way to the Gallery of Sorrows; we should build a forward base there, since its the closest safe point before we get to the tainted areas...' If the players can just rush the boss at the Spawning Pit without it being a worse plan than the slow and steady exploration, its not going to feel like the rest of that dungeon terrain actually meant anything. Or, there shouldn't be a simple boss that you can rush to conclude your business in the megadungeon (but in that case, it depends on the players having motivations that would keep them in such a place).

[Ice]

Thanks guys for all your suggestions. I will take a closer look at Angry's Megadungeon.


What's your medium of play? I'll admit, roll20 is convenient because I don't have to wipe away my battle maps after every combat, but when it comes to putting the dang thing on graph paper I kind of wish I had just graphed it in the first place, then be able to make that map public knowledge once the party clears the wing.


We play in person. what i did (maybe foolishly) was they found a map that draws itself out. so i keep notes on the randomly made up passageways and then draw it up on Photoshop. Then i print it out and give it to them the next week.



You are right however. If you simply allow the players to zoom through the dungeon until they hit an encounter then it's not really a megadungeon anymore. Here's another cool way to look at it. Treat your Megadungeon as if you were writing a completely normal campaign. Perhaps throw in towns, people to meet, stories to do, etcetera. Just make sure that it's all Inside of something (a really big tree, the bottom of a whirlpool, a cave, a mountain, etcetera) and then constantly remind them that "wow there's an entire dwarven city inside this one dungeon"

I have the dungeon set up into four factions that are trying to gain control of it. One is actually inspired by Angry's Dungeon. The humans have a base of operations set up just inside the dungeon. Gnolls are located in the west part trying to escape through the humans. A strange fungus is taking over the East blocking the water from flowing through (kinda stolen from Angry s Dungeon). The water that blocks off a clan of Minotaur's.

I like the idea of writing it like i'm writing a normal campaign. I could design the dungeon with long paths that open into a intricate area, each area would be the adventure for the night. Maybe one of the npc got captured and taken down one of the long paths and the group could go after and save him. the path opens into what looks like a temple and they find the npc about to be sacrificed to the gnolls deity, something like that... Then the group would have a place they could go back to inside the dungeon if they wanted to without having the dungeon be to complicated (at first) but the more paths they open up the more spread out the dungeon becomes.

Or perhaps im missing the point entirely.

[DragonBaneDM]

Thanks guys for all your suggestions. I will take a closer look at Angry's Megadungeon.



We play in person. what i did (maybe foolishly) was they found a map that draws itself out. so i keep notes on the randomly made up passageways and then draw it up on Photoshop. Then i print it out and give it to them the next week.



I have the dungeon set up into four factions that are trying to gain control of it. One is actually inspired by Angry's Dungeon. The humans have a base of operations set up just inside the dungeon. Gnolls are located in the west part trying to escape through the humans. A strange fungus is taking over the East blocking the water from flowing through (kinda stolen from Angry s Dungeon). The water that blocks off a clan of Minotaur's.

I like the idea of writing it like i'm writing a normal campaign. I could design the dungeon with long paths that open into a intricate area, each area would be the adventure for the night. Maybe one of the npc got captured and taken down one of the long paths and the group could go after and save him. the path opens into what looks like a temple and they find the npc about to be sacrificed to the gnolls deity, something like that... Then the group would have a place they could go back to inside the dungeon if they wanted to without having the dungeon be to complicated (at first) but the more paths they open up the more spread out the dungeon becomes.

Or perhaps im missing the point entirely.

I don't think that's foolish at all! It's a really cool magic item and explains why they'd have a near perfect version of your maps. This way you avoid the "Party mapmaker missed a game/misunderstood a description" conundrum. Well done.

Also your faction idea sounds absolutely baller. The minotaurs and their pets sound like they'd be really fun for mid level heroic characters to handle, and the fungus could be a neat boss to kinda serve as a soft DPR check they could retreat from if they're not strong enough yet! It sounds like a great game to be involved in, and your worldbuilding skills will certainly get stronger as the game starts/goes on. You didn't miss the point at all!

[Tanarii]

We play in person. what i did (maybe foolishly) was they found a map that draws itself out. so i keep notes on the randomly made up passageways and then draw it up on Photoshop. Then i print it out and give it to them the next week. Aw man, you're taking away the most fun* part of playing in a megadungeon. Mapping & trying desperately to figure out if you've screwed up, and these passages really don't circle back around to this other safe area over here. Will we make it before our spells & food run out?!

*definitions of "fun" may vary

[Shining Wrath]

You can almost make it up as you go. Visualize your mega-dungeon as a graph with nodes connected by edges. Mathematical / computer science sense of the word "graph" is used here.


You can think of the edges as "tunnels" or "doors" but they are anything a party uses to gain access to a new region.
Nodes are regions - an area of several planned encounters.
As a party traverses an edge there are random encounters. These aren't necessarily monsters - a cliff, a lake, a hidden door leading to a safe place to rest, et cetera. But there need to be enough wandering monsters of sufficient strength that simply stopping and camping whenever they feel like it is dangerous. Having a couple of trolls sitting on top of their Leomund's Tiny Hut might get the idea across.
One of the most important "encounters" is a branch where they choose which way to go. If the choice is wrong, they have a series of random encounters until they randomly encounter "end of the line" and realize they have to backtrack. You might even make them keep track of food and water.


Make it impossible to traverse some edges until certain actions have been performed, like finding an item in one of the nodes, or convincing someone to tell them the password, and so on.
You can then throw the dungeon open with only two or three "nodes" prepared, each of which might take most of a game session to clear, connected by edges with random encounters that will keep the party on their toes. As they gain the ability to traverse new edges, that opens up new nodes, which you then must prepare. Of course you probably want a plan for what each node will be like - a paragraph of description so you're telling your story as the party moves forward.

[Ice]

You can almost make it up as you go. Visualize your mega-dungeon as a graph with nodes connected by edges. Mathematical / computer science sense of the word "graph" is used here.


You can think of the edges as "tunnels" or "doors" but they are anything a party uses to gain access to a new region.
Nodes are regions - an area of several planned encounters.
As a party traverses an edge there are random encounters. These aren't necessarily monsters - a cliff, a lake, a hidden door leading to a safe place to rest, et cetera. But there need to be enough wandering monsters of sufficient strength that simply stopping and camping whenever they feel like it is dangerous. Having a couple of trolls sitting on top of their Leomund's Tiny Hut might get the idea across.
One of the most important "encounters" is a branch where they choose which way to go. If the choice is wrong, they have a series of random encounters until they randomly encounter "end of the line" and realize they have to backtrack. You might even make them keep track of food and water.


Make it impossible to traverse some edges until certain actions have been performed, like finding an item in one of the nodes, or convincing someone to tell them the password, and so on.
You can then throw the dungeon open with only two or three "nodes" prepared, each of which might take most of a game session to clear, connected by edges with random encounters that will keep the party on their toes. As they gain the ability to traverse new edges, that opens up new nodes, which you then must prepare. Of course you probably want a plan for what each node will be like - a paragraph of description so you're telling your story as the party moves forward.

Those are some really good points. i already made one version of a node in the form of the water that separates the Minotaur's. I didn't think about doing that in a node way though. Im going to have to put more of those inside my dungeon! the dead end path is also cool, though should i put some clue or subtle hint at which path is the right one or just let the players make the choice based on nothing?

[Shining Wrath]

Those are some really good points. i already made one version of a node in the form of the water that separates the Minotaur's. I didn't think about doing that in a node way though. Im going to have to put more of those inside my dungeon! the dead end path is also cool, though should i put some clue or subtle hint at which path is the right one or just let the players make the choice based on nothing?

Having there be some way to determine the right way seems like more fun. Some sort of skill check related to knowledge or exploration - "I read the tracks as saying the left path is most trodden" or "the ancient legend of Bruniel Brownaxe reminds us to take the left-hand path" or whatever.

[Fflewddur Fflam]

I've never really quite been satisfied with my attempts at megadungeons, but one idea that feels right to me is that to capture the sense of scale,

And they call it a "mine".... A "MINE"!!!

[INDYSTAR188]

Yup. That's why I posted the link to Angry's Megadungeon, same as you did you ninja! His design philosophy is completely different from "PCs strive not to get lost and lose all their resources" survival-style exploration. I like that style ... but I also love his alternative.

I like AngryDM's advice in general a whole lot. This sounds pretty compelling. Kinda wish he had an abstract section or something though, he can get long-winded.

[Tanarii]

I like AngryDM's advice in general a whole lot. This sounds pretty compelling. Kinda wish he had an abstract section or something though, he can get long-winded.
He can. He spends a lot of time on underlying theory because that's who he is. And he explains it at great length because that's also who he is. :smallbiggrin: But also because he's not just trying to do something, he's trying to teach a concept.

If you just want to see the building of the megadungeon so far and not the underlying theory / explanations, it's in just three articles where he draws the high level meta map, and then takes you on a tour of it:
http://theangrygm.com/megadungeon-monday-and-then-you-make-a-map/
http://theangrygm.com/a-tale-of-two-maps-1/
http://theangrygm.com/a-tale-of-two-maps-part-2/

[odigity]

I love mega-dungeons. The granddaddy of them all was Undermountain. Two boxed sets of dungeon, so big there was even a dark "Tortuga"-like city on level 3 and funny enough, restrooms with portals leading to Otyugh pits conveniently located all over the place.

It had quick reference cards for random descriptions of rooms, environmental effects, noises etc along with several for traps found along the way. More importantly it had the encounter tables, plus encounter tables for when you caused noise fighting the first encounter tables. Each map sheet was two foot tall by 3 feet wide with standard grid squares. The first three levels were one map sheet, I think the next three were two sheets. You literally could make an entire 3-epic campaign of just this dungeon.

I got that box set (Ruins of Undermountain for AD&D 2nd Edition) for my birthday in 1991. It was awesome. I keep hoping they'll update it to a newer edition, but they never do.