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Shinizak
2019-02-11, 08:36 PM
Okay. Your players have fought every monster, cast every spell, took every risk, and reached the dizzying heights of 20th level characters. All after a fun and rewarding multi-year long campaign.

What does that last dungeon look like? What kind of threats exist in it? What are traps like in this place?

In short, how would you design are 20th level, end-game dungeon?

JoeJ
2019-02-11, 08:59 PM
Is this for some version of D&D, or another game with levels?

Shinizak
2019-02-11, 09:08 PM
I guess d&d, but I don't have an edition in mind. We can reword it as "peak character progression" if you want.

SimonMoon6
2019-02-11, 09:09 PM
At 20th level, you shouldn't be in dungeons anymore.

At 20th level, traps are irrelevant, at least in the sense of things that rogues need to disarm. (But I think traps are pretty irrelevant at any level. If they don't kill anyone (and they usually don't), then they're just speed-bumps, causing minor resource management issues).

At 20th level, there's no point to having a dungeon hiding an orc guarding a chest behind a door (even a 20th level orc). Assume the PCs can sense where everything is and pass through all obstacles at will.

Fights can happen in locations, yes, but don't assume that the usual attrition of resources is likely or even desirable. The PCs should be able to jump to the main boss fight without having to wade through a swarm of rats and kobolds (even 20th level rats and kobolds).

The other possibility is: Create dungeons that make 20th level characters feel like 1st level characters. Every 10' square is full of anti-magic fields, surrounded by walls which are actually walls of force. Every location is protected against teleportation and any special divination spells. In short, all the awesome powers that the PCs gained during their long careers are utterly moot and they might as well not have bothered, making the game pointless and unfun. That's the only other option.

Max_Killjoy
2019-02-11, 09:10 PM
https://sep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-85270312810582/10-stainless-steel-meat-grinder-by-the-sausage-maker-2.jpg

Shinizak
2019-02-11, 09:51 PM
At 20th level, you shouldn't be in dungeons anymore.

At 20th level, traps are irrelevant, at least in the sense of things that rogues need to disarm. (But I think traps are pretty irrelevant at any level. If they don't kill anyone (and they usually don't), then they're just speed-bumps, causing minor resource management issues).

At 20th level, there's no point to having a dungeon hiding an orc guarding a chest behind a door (even a 20th level orc). Assume the PCs can sense where everything is and pass through all obstacles at will.

Fights can happen in locations, yes, but don't assume that the usual attrition of resources is likely or even desirable. The PCs should be able to jump to the main boss fight without having to wade through a swarm of rats and kobolds (even 20th level rats and kobolds).

The other possibility is: Create dungeons that make 20th level characters feel like 1st level characters. Every 10' square is full of anti-magic fields, surrounded by walls which are actually walls of force. Every location is protected against teleportation and any special divination spells. In short, all the awesome powers that the PCs gained during their long careers are utterly moot and they might as well not have bothered, making the game pointless and unfun. That's the only other option.

That feels like the worst possible, least imaginative approach to DMing I've EVER heard.

Mechalich
2019-02-11, 11:29 PM
The 'final dungeon' is the backdrop for the conclusion of a campaign. Meaning you're facing the final boss and their choice minions, usually within their personal stronghold. This will vary vastly depending on who or what said final boss actually is, which is dependent upon the campaign in question.

If the final boss is a demon, then the setting is probably an abyssal fortress, and most of the minions are going to be demons. If the final boss is a fey lord, then it'll be some weird some fey domain and you'll fight a whole bunch of high-level fey. If the boss is a necromancer, then maybe the setting is a ruined castle or temple and most of the enemies are undead. Everything is going to depend on what you are doing.

Now, it is true that, for certain D&D editions (mostly 3.X) at 20th level the game has broken down completely and the concept of dungeon (along with other concepts like mortality and finite quantities) has largely vanished from existence, but relatively few games are played at this combination of level and optimization.

Pauly
2019-02-12, 12:00 AM
The entrance is a tight winding corridor through living rock. To access the door they have to go through an anti-magic shield that will dispel all their buffs. This will automatically activate the door. The mechanism to open the door is a counterweight of several hundreds of tons which seals the entrance behind them.

They are now in a large courtyard with all of the final boss’ minions and final boss himself assembled. If they survive the fight they then get to pick through all the living chambers and treasure rooms located on the far side of the courtyard.

paddyfool
2019-02-12, 01:19 AM
Here's one example of a 30th level epic dungeon that's truly made for PCs at the height of 3.5's insanity: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?98414-Vote-Up-A-Villain-V-Epic!-Voting-Closed-Villain-Complete!/page17&p=5453448#post5453448

(Description starts with the final boss since that's what was voted up, but keep scrolling and you'll get there).

Generally speaking, there should be no friendly terrain for the PCs unless they literally remake the terrain at this point, and doing so should not be easy.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-12, 01:50 AM
Most of the assumptions here seem .... honestly slightly silly. I see no reason why a level 20 dungeon needs to be any different than any other level of dungeon. I see no reason why traps would be irrelevant. I see no reason why level 20 characters would be able to sense where everything is, and bypass it at will. All of those seem to assume the enemy is a blithering incompetent. Someone as powerful as the PC's would be able to make very relevant traps, live wherever they pleased - including in a dirty, stinking hole in the ground (say they're the troglodyte god of stench, foul temper, torture and more stench) - and they'd be able to block both scrying and teleportation.

That said ... if it's the last dungeon of a campaign, I'd make it memorable. And if dirty, stinking holes in the ground have been visited before in the campaign, I'd not use that again.

So what have I used before? A mile-high corporate tower, all glass and luxury and little spiderbots to see to your every need - or laser you in the eye if they don't like the looks of you. An ice asteroid, transparent, so you can look straight out at the chilling cold emptyness of the void. The city of Madripore, during the final assault by Entropy.

What else? I've had a final battle inside the warped mind of a lich. I've had a dragon fight (back in the days, so long ago, when I still thought dragons were cool) inside an ice cave, all glittery ice, slippery floors, dripping icicles, pools of ice cold water - and gold, of course, lots of gold. A Mars base (just think Aliens 2, only with vampires rather than xenomorphs).

There was a particularly golden moment on the Mars base, when one merc was dumb enough to meet the head vampire alone. He had time to shout 'CONTAAACT!' into his coms - and everyone could listen in as he emptied an entire belt of ammo from his Ingram Valiant, finishing with a tinkling of spent casing falling to the ground, followed by a whisper: .. was that all? Ok - my turn!

Eldan
2019-02-12, 03:42 AM
The approach has to be different from a lower level dungeon. After all, if gameplay stays the same, why level at all?

That means, to me, that you can't take away the PCs powers. No teleportation blockers, no indestructible walls, no giant antimagic fields. At least not everywhere. This goes double if we assume this is the final end of hte campaign and the PCs retire after this. You want to end on a high note, surely.

Now, the thing here is that your players may be immortal teleporting, time stopping, plane-altering demigods at level 20, or they may be monks and fighters. You can not make assumptions about what a "normal" group looks like on this level, because after a while, at least in third edition, "level" becomes an immaterial measurement of power. YOu can't make the level 20 dungeon, you have to make your level 20 dungeon.

What do I mean by that? Start by writing down your characters greatest strengths, and then challenge those. Your wizard likes to play five-dimensional contingency chess? Challenge them by someone who does the same. Your wizard wants to be the strongest there ever was? End a boss fight by wrestling a fire giant barbarian over the caldera of a volcano. Your druid reshapes the land with a wave of his hand? Drop him into Hades or Pandemonium or the Negative Energy Plane and make that the only thing keeping him alive.

And if your party consists of a sword and board fighter, a healing cleric, a sneaky rogue and a wizard who is really proud he just learned meteor swarm? Then you let them fight a stronger series of monsters in some hallways. That's perfectly alright too.

But tailor it to your party.

GreatDane
2019-02-12, 10:32 AM
There's not a single answer that fits across D&D editions; they aren't homogeneous enough. A 20th-level 5e character and a 20th-level 3.5e character have only nominal similarity, even before getting into their classes and other abilities. I think Eldan's answer above is the best one here - whatever the PCs are capable of, an adventure at "peak power progression" should be the most challenging, epic pinnacle of a campaign with those characters.

Jay R
2019-02-12, 12:11 PM
It's an arena, in which you find rivals who have fought every monster, cast every spell, taken every risk, and reached the dizzying heights of 20th level characters.

Or a Mirror of Opposition, the game's ultimate balancer, which always provides a fair encounter for any party, on any level, with any amount of cheese.

Rhedyn
2019-02-12, 12:27 PM
It doesn't look like anything. It shouldn't exist.

But if you are going on this mad journey, Epic intelligent monsters that are sequestered in a dungeon for a reason. The dungeon shouldn't be in "normal space". Teleporting to known areas is fine, but teleporting to unknown area should be a risk. Do not negate the PCs abilities, establish necessary limitations with counters (earthquake doesn't collapse the whole dungeon, but it may collapse a hallway, the monsters buried may care).

Traps, illusions, counter divinations, Scry-fry tactics, etc. There shouldn't be "dead moments" this dungeon won't be a crawl, it's one massive encounter where are any moment one of the denizens will try to do away with the party.

Just do not do the Paizo thing where "regular dungeon but with bigger numbers" is just how they consider level 15+ dungeons to be.

Khedrac
2019-02-12, 05:06 PM
I guess d&d, but I don't have an edition in mind. We can reword it as "peak character progression" if you want.

You very much have an edition (or editions) in mind - or rather you have an edition not in mind. In BECMI D&D humans are only just over half-way through the level ladder (1 to 36), a mid-Companion tier (levels 15-25) dungeon is probably either in adverse conditions, or off the prime plane or somehow in unusual circumstances so some of the PCs resourses are going into surviving/reaching the dungeon. That or is it a mini-dungeon providing a break in pace from politics.
Adventures are more likely to be spaced out that in a traditional dungeon, so yes, dungeons are becoming less usual as adventure locations (though some will keep popping up all the way to upper Master levels).

Yuo are definitely right to say D&D though - whilst one would expect MERP characters to be at their peak (level tables up to 20) the adventures included the classic dungeons of Dol Guldur and Moria, and were statted for MERP and RoleMaster (level tables up to 100) - with the necromancer coming in (I believe) at level 66 so level 20 MERP characters would find the high levels dungeons places to tread very very carefully...

Scots Dragon
2019-02-13, 02:54 AM
I don’t think blocking teleportation and scrying are necessarily the sins people think they are. There are a whole bunch of teleport blocking and scry misleading wards in the books so them not being in use raises the question of why your BBEG either isn’t using them or hasn’t paid someone to install them.

These are just going to be part of the traps and security of a high level dungeon. Any attempt to teleport puts you in a locked room with a dozen iron golems instead of your intended target. A bunch of magic immune monsters to deal with the mageling who had the temerity to intrude on the Shadow Lord’s domain.

Any attempt to scry results in static because the Shadow Lord has a sense of privacy.

Kaptin Keen
2019-02-13, 03:16 AM
I don’t think blocking teleportation and scrying are necessarily the sins people think they are. There are a whole bunch of teleport blocking and scry misleading wards in the books so them not being in use raises the question of why your BBEG either isn’t using them or hasn’t paid someone to install them.

These are just going to be part of the traps and security of a high level dungeon. Any attempt to teleport puts you in a locked room with a dozen iron golems instead of your intended target. A bunch of magic immune monsters to deal with the mageling who had the temerity to intrude on the Shadow Lord’s domain.

Any attempt to scry results in static because the Shadow Lord has a sense of privacy.

Precisely. Thinking that high level npc's should somehow be defenceless against high level pc's is .. inane. Also, it's certain to make the whole thing uninteresting, unchallenging, and ultimately pointless. So any obvious tactic should be obviously countered. If your end-of-campaign BBEG is a genius level opponent - and let's face it, he likely isn't on the intellectual level of an ogre - you should play him as such.

In the case of teleportation: Have one room be scry-able. Have a picture of that room painted, hide it in the basement of the largest, most famous library in the game world - and put hints about this large, famous painting in any historical records you can think of. Make a story about it: The only known picture of the great Ur-Mage Vitriola Villaine, at the famous Poison Feast in her personal chambers, where she invited the great emperors of old to a peace conference - then killed all of them. And it's all an elaborate trap, obviously, having this one place the PC's can teleport to, only to find themselves surrounded by teleport anchors (so they cannot leave), in a room filled with a permanent Incendiary Cloud, and populated by Iron Golems, fire elementals and ... whatever.

Because if I can think of it, surely your genius BBEG can too.

Maybe leave hints that BBEG also spent a lot of effort removing any pictures of herself and her stronghold. Let them wonder whether she simply missed this one painting - or deliberately left it behind.

JoeJ
2019-02-13, 03:17 AM
The last dungeon could be the party's own stronghold, with them defending instead of attacking. The BBEG uses all the tactics the PCs used when they were the ones storming the dungeon.

Wraith
2019-02-13, 04:59 AM
Generally speaking, there should be no friendly terrain for the PCs unless they literally remake the terrain at this point, and doing so should not be easy.

Reminds me of The Apocalypse Stone, a 2nd Edition supplement designed to end the multiverse.
It starts by trying to approach a floating castle that's guarded by two Elder Chromatic Dragons and landing in a courtyard filled with ALL of the worst Save-or-Die Monsters known to mankind. Halfway through, all of your Divine Magic is turned off just in time to fight Molech, Lord of the 6th Circle of Hell. There's an optional Tarrasque, also while without divine magic - fighting it causes an Avatar of Tyr to manifest and declare that You Lose! Good Day Sir!

It's not a sane adventure by any measure of the word, mostly just an exercise in absurd logistics and then rolling dice until everyone is dead in the cheapest way possible; "Rocket Tag" with spells and Save vs. Death effects.
But that feels appropriate, to me. If you find yourself fighting an Ancient Red Dragon and it successfully takes a bite out of you, or a 20 Wizard/20 Sorcerer points a finger and you don't have a way to stop him? You're probably not supposed to walk it off... :smalltongue:

Eldan
2019-02-13, 05:01 AM
I don’t think blocking teleportation and scrying are necessarily the sins people think they are. There are a whole bunch of teleport blocking and scry misleading wards in the books so them not being in use raises the question of why your BBEG either isn’t using them or hasn’t paid someone to install them.

These are just going to be part of the traps and security of a high level dungeon. Any attempt to teleport puts you in a locked room with a dozen iron golems instead of your intended target. A bunch of magic immune monsters to deal with the mageling who had the temerity to intrude on the Shadow Lord’s domain.

Any attempt to scry results in static because the Shadow Lord has a sense of privacy.

I don't think they are absolute sins, but they should be used sparingly. Of course you shouldn't necessarily scry and die the Dark Lord directly. That's anticlimactic. There should be a struggle. But the player invested in learning those abilities, so they should get to use them. Especially in the campaign finale. How you go about it can vary, of course, but if a player likes having an ability, they should get to use it. Perhaps the villain built his base on the moon, or underwater, or in an airship, and teleporting to the outside is the only way to get there. Perhaps they can scry out the guard schedule and attack when the defences are down. But the ability should do something.

Think of it like a TV series. If you have a superhero TV series, you don't want to see a final fight where the hero can't use his primary ability, you want to see him go all out and kick ass. The "lost their power" episode comes in the middle of the season, so they have somethign to build up to later.

Scots Dragon
2019-02-13, 05:15 AM
I don't think they are absolute sins, but they should be used sparingly. Of course you shouldn't necessarily scry and die the Dark Lord directly. That's anticlimactic. There should be a struggle. But the player invested in learning those abilities, so they should get to use them. Especially in the campaign finale. How you go about it can vary, of course, but if a player likes having an ability, they should get to use it. Perhaps the villain built his base on the moon, or underwater, or in an airship, and teleporting to the outside is the only way to get there. Perhaps they can scry out the guard schedule and attack when the defences are down. But the ability should do something.

Think of it like a TV series. If you have a superhero TV series, you don't want to see a final fight where the hero can't use his primary ability, you want to see him go all out and kick ass. The "lost their power" episode comes in the middle of the season, so they have somethign to build up to later.

Except, this isn't the 'lost their power' episode. This isn't taking away the ability; it's demonstrating that the villain is a threat that can counter and match the hero's abilities. The players still have those abilities and can still use them, but they're more difficult to use properly specifically because they're facing a more difficult threat.

The villain's lair can't be hit with a scry-and-die, but maybe the ancient artefact containing their weakness or vital resources to countering the deathtraps and monsters in said lair can be hit with scry-and-die tactics. Hell, it's possible to dispel and break down wards, so those abilities can come into play afterwards as an escape method for when the villain's base inevitably begins its self-destruct countdown upon the villain's apparent destruction.

Also, those abilities are lower level than the actual main abilities that the party is bringing to bear at 20th level.

Getting to use teleport is the cool new ability for a 9th-level party, yes. But they're a 20th-level party, and that stuff is literally eleven levels ago. It's like complaining that colour spray is less useful as a 12th level character, but they put the effort into gaining it so they should still get to use it.

They should be playing with stuff like gate, prismatic sphere, soul bind, time stop, and wish instead, perhaps making it a necessity to use some of those spells; maybe the villain has a tarrasque enslaved and you need the wish or miracle to finally kill it off. Maybe the villain has a collection of clones so the only surefire way to kill them is through the imprisonment or soul bind spells. You can still implement these while blocking off options like teleport.

Jay R
2019-02-13, 10:15 AM
The last dungeon could be the party's own stronghold, with them defending instead of attacking. The BBEG uses all the tactics the PCs used when they were the ones storming the dungeon.

And there we are, going full circle and arriving back at original D&D.

Nickthef
2019-02-13, 10:22 AM
interesting

Segev
2019-02-13, 12:34 PM
General high level anything should follow the advice in this thread that boils down to making the broken tricks absolutely required to get through it. The dungeon can’t be easily navigated if you can’t fly and casually teleport around. Immunity to death effects is how the “weak” traps don’t kill the basic denizens. Dispelling and disjunction are on the table and actively dangerous to those using magic to survive the impossible doom of the place.

Just getting there might require planar travel, and astral dreadnaughts with their silver-cord snapping jaws are valid door guards.

SunderedWorldDM
2019-02-13, 04:00 PM
Unless you're playing a one-shot, an epic level dungeon is the culmination of months and possibly years of play. It's not as much about what's in there and more about closing the story that was woven to get to that point. If the players want to bypass all of your traps and puzzles just to put Baron on Evilface in the ground once and for all, then unless Evilface would have some way to stop them, it's not as much of a deal. Your main goal is to end the story, not necessarily challenge them with your dungeons like you have in the past.

Calthropstu
2019-02-13, 04:19 PM
This was my design:

A tower covered every inch with literally thousands of overlapping illusion magics. Interacting didn't automatically grant saving throws because the illusions covered exactly what was there. Except the rare occasion when it didn't. The trap was the tower itself. From the outside it looked like a tower, but the whole thing was sitting suspended over a deadly pit filled with prismatic spheres.

SimonMoon6
2019-02-14, 08:47 PM
I find the ideas of a "super-intelligent, high level enemy" and "passive dude who waits somewhere for someone to come kill him" to be incompatible.

If the villain has any idea that the PCs are coming after him, surely he should use "scry and die" tactics on the PCs. No need for a dungeon then, the fight happens wherever the PCs happen to be sleeping.

Of course, it's possible that the PCs are constantly putting up defenses against those tactics, but at least that uses up some of their resources. And even if they are protected against that particular strategy, the villain can still be sending threats against the heroes, like an army of flying monkeys.

A pro-active villain can really negate the need for any sort of dungeon filled with traps and orcs guarding chests hiding behind doors.

Tvtyrant
2019-02-14, 10:01 PM
Rich people still need to store stuff and sleep somewhere, so I imagine they would still exist.

In D&D 3.5 I would assume:
1. It is in a demi-plane of the owner's making that forbids any teleportation while on it.
2. The walls are made of permanent Walls of Force with Prismatic Spheres/Walls held between them, making digging through them incredibly slow and wasteful.
3. The insides of everything are covered in Invisible Spell Explosive Runes and Glyphs of Warding. Using see invisibility or true sight will immediately kill you.
4. There are various invisible creatures that act as guardians; these are weak because the goal is getting you to use See Invisibility and so kill yourself.
5. The Glyphs contain a number of trap spells.
6. Alarm glyphs are most common, if they go off the owner will scry the party in some way and then send better minions or come themselves with backup.

Avista
2019-02-14, 10:09 PM
If I run a level 20 dungeon, I'd pit the team against one of the gods/dieties of the campaign. Or they fight against an entire army.

Jay R
2019-02-15, 11:24 AM
1. We all know that Superman could kill Lex Luthor with one punch. In the best Superman stories, he isn't trying to fight Lex directly; he's trying to find the missing jewels, prove somebody's innocence, or otherwise solve a mystery.

Similarly, if the PCs have skills to easily defeat the monsters, then the hardest part of the adventure is finding out which folks are the monsters they need to defeat.

------

2. The set of monsters who can give a direct challenge to a party of 20th-level PCs is a party of 20th-level NPCs.

-----------

3. You're right that murderhoboing is too easy for PCs on that level. The solution, going all the way back to original D&D, is for them to settle down and commit to protecting the people in their lands. Then major challenges will come to you.

JoeJ
2019-02-15, 12:10 PM
3. You're right that murderhoboing is too easy for PCs on that level. The solution, going all the way back to original D&D, is for them to settle down and commit to protecting the people in their lands. Then major challenges will come to you.

A variation on that would be for a villain to take over the PCs' own stronghold, forcing them to get past the defenses they themselves set up. This is fairly common trope in the superhero genre, but there's no fundamental reason it couldn't be used in other genres as well, as long as the party has a headquarters that they've defended.

icefractal
2019-02-17, 01:25 AM
Some ideas for high-level dungeons:

[Ooze Dungeon]
Imagine thousands of Gelatinous Cubes as a building material; a dungeon that can constantly re-arrange itself, controlled by an ooze hive mind. Acting more like an ant colony than a person, it can be tricked into ignoring intruders, until they cause too much trouble. Then it wakes up a mind, and things get interesting. Uses many types of ooze for various purposes - Adaptive Ooze for durable barriers, Carnivorous Blobs to destroy intruders, Slithering Pits to hold dangerous things, Immortal Ichor to control people and to act as a "conscious mind" when needed, Plasma Oozes for heat, and so forth.

[Planar Labyrinth]
This one is based on a series of demiplanes I actually used in a game. The way the demiplane creation spells work in PF, it makes as much sense to build a bunch of small demiplanes connected together by portals as one large one. And doing so has some benefits - you can set different properties in different rooms, it's relatively easy to rearrange things if needed, and it provides extra defense against invaders. You can't go through the walls, because those are the edges of the world, and the internal geometry can effectively cross through itself. This could have any kind of defenses / guards, but one obvious one is hostile planar properties.


Teleportation is an interesting question. On the one hand, what's even the point of having twenty levels if they all play the same? By which token blocking it would be counter-indicated. On the other hand, enemies shouldn't generally be stupid, and if there are ways to block it then it would be logical to use them. But I'd say use them in moderation, not assuming the dungeon creator has unlimited resources. Warding the vaults? Yes. The inner core of rooms? Possibly. The entire thing? To my preference, no.

Warding against scrying can accomplish a similar purpose in making the traversal relevant. Sure, you can teleport in blindly, but at that point you're still visiting most of the dungeon, just in a random order. And if the dungeon in question is being used as any kind of base of operations, then warding against scrying is practically a necessity.