Castlevania Dungeon Advice

[Orga_Strange]

As a pre-face to this, I did not see anything in any of the sub-forums specifically for dungeon-building, if I missed it, please let me know and I will happily move this thread to the proper area.

So, I'm currently running a campaign in which my players are on a sidequest trying to garner the favor of the Raven Queen by slaying an ancient vampire who's lair is located high in the mountains and has been terrorizing the blah blah blah it's Dracula from Castlevania. Literally Dracula from Castlevania. I love the games and the castle itself would make for a sick-nasty dungeon with plenty of reasons to have various creepy crawlies going about and all kinds of boss fights. My problem is that I have DM'd exactly one campaign before this and it did not have dungeons. Most combat was open-field theater of the mind type ****. The group I'm with right now is a big fan of miniatures and good ol' fashioned dungeon crawls, which frankly, I have no experience building. So my question to you fine folks is such:

How would you suggest I go about building Castlevania as a dungeon? Should I just try and build it from the ground up? Or should I try to build it off a pre-existing dungeon, altering it to fit my plans as needed? And do any of you veteran dungeon builders have any advice on how to do that? As a side note, I'm less concerned with the monsters that would inhabit the halls, those I can cobble together easily enough, it's just the actual mapping of the area itself , ie puzzles and traps, I have trouble with.

[SaurOps]

If ever there were a time for randomly rolling up rooms for a dungeon, it would be here. The setting details regarding it are that it is a manifestation of chaos and is never the same, even if you manage to visit it multiple times.

There are usually clusters of rooms associated with a specific boss monster, though, and they have a theme. Select which mythologically-derived monsters you want to use, and make locations based around the theme. Then roll to fill up space, if need be.

[EvilAnagram]

SaurOps makes a good point, but I would also suggest that you design the dungeon groupings with some intent. Sure, randomly generated rooms are fine, but you should decide what treasures you want in each random section, what order you want them to tackle those sections in, and how equipment and experience gained early on will help them overcome obstacles later on.

When the choices you make have specific intentions for guiding player growth, the dungeon experience becomes much more engaging.

[Monavic]

http://www.castlevaniacrypt.com/cv/maps You could use this as inspiration. It may even be fun to redraw the maps in 3d and just replay the game in dnd. But I wouldn't tell the players what you did let them imagine whatever they like.

[furby076]

There should be rooms with puzzles and traps. Make use of time based....don't solve it in time and bad things happen. Monsters attack while the trap is being disabled. Or the trap is to get out of the room before the hourglass empties. The PCs can see the monster on the other side of a gate. Don't figure out the puzzle in time, and the monsters pop out for a particularly rough fight.

Feel free to repurpose other dungeons

[Madbox]

Make sure to include roast turkey hidden inside breakable walls.

[jaappleton]

Make sure to include roast turkey hidden inside breakable walls.

I read the topic title and came in just to post this.