Epic dungeon crawl

[Biggus]

Was there ever one published for 3E? Failing that, for any other edition? Or has anyone ever made one themselves?

My players are going to be about level 18 when they finish the current adventure, they like hack and slash and also puzzles and tactics (not too bothered about roleplaying and story), so a dungeon crawl seems like a good way to go. However, all the resources I currently have to build one at high levels is about 2 pages of suggestions in the ELH, so any ideas appreciated (including any other types of adventure which would suit them other than an actual dungeon).

In case it helps, they're a Fighter-Barbarian melee bruiser, a Ranger-Rogue all-rounder, a buffer-Bard and a Druid who's also fairly support-oriented, low-to-mid op.

[Xervous]

Are you aiming to make an epic dungeon crawl as per what the progression of 3.5 suggests? Or are you aiming to make an upscaled and reskinned bundle of threats that is not very mechanically different from 5-10 levels prior?

Note that the former tends to be very unforgiving on under equipped Martials.

Edit:

For an epic dungeon as per 3.5 rules you’re looking at exotic and fantastical terrain. The dungeon is composed of rooms linked by portals, you could try burrowing your way through the miles of solid rock between them and there are hidden rooms you can find this way, but due to the influence of the Negative Energy Plane here (oh did I mention you take 1 neg level per minute?) there are numerous spheres of annihilation remaining dormant in the stone. Have fun digging without a map.

Some rooms are broken up by holes that lead to the ethereal plane, which features its own separate set of rooms. Most of the rock projects onto the ethereal, however there are more mundane inclusions that yield the empty ghost space. Some rooms have sizable objects on the ethereal that can be used for cover against force effects originating from the material.

This place was originally an arms factory that produced short lived blades with the properties of spheres of annihilation. There are a few malfunctioning talismans of the sphere around. While the original workers were killed long ago they are bound to this terrible place, reanimating (quite insane) overnight even if annihilated. For the most part they go about a mockery of their tasks, but quickly rally to a ‘final defense’.

A group of inevitables gathered here to puzzle over the various transgressions. To date they find the unliving denizens guilty on countless charges but have not discovered a way to deliver a lasting punishment. Having lingered for so long their programming is malfunctioning. One inevitable was destroyed recently, and its replacement has been imprisoned by its corrupt fellows and will be so kept until it grows more cooperative. Given enough time the inevitables may find a way to deepen the connection to the negative energy plane, pulling through countless spheres and void stones sufficient to keep this dungeon permanently erased, which would satisfy their duties. Of course that critical mass would consume the whole planet if a few of the inevitables got their way. At the very least there’d be a wightocalypse due to the negative levels inflicted on surface dwellers and under dark denizens alike.

Working around the inevitables are duplicitous Yugoloths. The ‘loths have figured out most of the trigger actions that piss off the inevitables, and are trying to figure out how to interact safely with the undead laborers. They desire a continuous supply of annihilation blades for their power struggles, and their leader is contemplating assaulting a minor god with the armaments.

Sprinkle on another twist, the Tarrasque is here, kept in perpetual regenerative stupor as spheres struggle with devouring it. Some poorly worded wish brought this whole arrangement about in the first place “because someone might just wish the tarrasque alive if I wished it dead “. Put some immortal creature trapped in the tarrasque’s mouth and you have a humorous circumstance to introduce a potentially helpful NPC. (NPC safe from negative energy while inside big T).

[Beni-Kujaku]

I don't think there really was a lot of long adventures published at this level. There is this one: Belly of the Great Beast (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/13704/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-33-Belly-of-the-Great-Beast) for 21-24, and one in Oerth 22 ( https://greyhawkonline.com/?smd_process_download=1&download_id=5655 ), page 46, for similar levels.

Then, there is Elder Evils (http://dnd.etherealspheres.com/eBooks/DnD_3.5/core/D&D%203.5%20Elder%20Evils.pdf), who describes a lot of high-level-but-not-quite-epic encounters (and one or two clearly epic), which you can use to make the transition to epic, or directly when your players are low-epic. You can just put them in sequence to make a somewhat interesting dungeon crawl.


The problem is, dungeon-crawling becomes quite obsolete at so high levels. People can just Find the Path to their destination, teleport wherever they want... And resurrection becomes so easy that something must be able to kill the entire party at once to become a danger. You have to prepare for a lot of things and be ready to say "no" to a lot of things. Also, adding some time constraints is good to prevent people for taking a nap in the middle. A nap at epic level can be extremely dangerous because it basically resets the entire party. Then, have original, puzzle encounters that take advantage of the environment and of the weaknesses of the PC instead of just bigger numbers. That will get old quickly.

Some say this makes a combat-heavy scenario impossible, and that most of the campaign should be role-playing. Others say that failing at roleplaying doesn't have consequences anymore since you can just beat a country alone, and that the scenario should be extremely combat oriented. Make your choice, but mixing the two might not lead to something very good.

Look here: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?197187-Epic-Level-Campaigns

And finally, just go and invent something. There are epic monsters, create epic stakes, make the dungeon teleportation proof, absolutely forbid Epic Magic, and here you go.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

It's not hard to throw something together. Generate a random dungeon map (https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/) and/or random caverns (https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/cavern.cgi) (set peripheral egress to "tiling") and populate it with thematically appropriate monsters of the proper CR/EL.

How about a red dragon's lair? A mature adult is CR 18, old is CR 20, very old is CR 21, and you can get some pointers on fleshing out its spells and feats (and don't forget about skill tricks in CS) from this recent thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?628650-Make-Red-Dragons-Great-Again!). I made a post there with these same links, but a proper red dragon lair (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?322346-Volcanic-mountain-cavern-style-dungeon-as-red-dragon-lair#2) with advanced Obsidian Ooze (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fw/20031123a) encounters to soften them up before the final battle.

[Endarire]

D&D 3.5 epic should be more than "just about what we were doing a few levels ago but with higher stats and more resists/immunities." I agree with the Xervous approach of making epic and near-epic levels exotic. Perhaps the actions of the PCs or/and their associates/antagonists have caused the planes to be tearing apart, or the fabric of time and space to unravel. You're effectively superheroes at this point (and super-superheroes more likely), meaning get to the extreme and exotic stuff!

[Crake]

World's largest dungeon was intended to be a 1-20 dungeon crawl, but there's no reason you can't just find a way to plonk them down into the last section of the dungeon?

[Xeni]

not sure about published because me and my table only do homebrew. but there are a LOT of different things you can include. I have ran a low to high level dungeon crawl before, so I do have some advice and content ideas.

first of all, at high levels divination and transportation capabilities of the players are IMO the two things most responsible for turning a dungeon crawl into...not a dungeon crawl. coming up for excuses as to why these don't work or are limited will go a long way towards preserving the feel of a dungeon crawl (which will end up more fun for both you and the players). Maybe this dungeon crawl is taking place in a series of passages and caverns that have been formed through the corpse of a dead god or similarly exotic medium. the effects of which are that teleportation ranges are limited to 100 ft and extradimensional travel into, but not out of, the area is impossible. similarly divination effects that would provide information more than an hour into the future or concerning things further than 200 ft away simply dont work. all of this caused by the 'unique magical energies' or what have you of whatever exotic setting you want this to take place in.

puzzles are usually pretty level independent and I've never been to great at them, so i won't give you any advice there lol.

In terms of combat and tactics, there are lots of ways to make that fun for a group. you can have extreme terrain like drop offs into lava, steep cliffs, traps in the middle of a fight, narrow edges to balance on, strong artificial air currents that prevent flight, small passages with tiny enemies where players have to shrink or squeeze. or shrink and even then squeeze. all sorts of things. you can have tactical opportunities, things like objects that explode if struck or bumped into, pools of flammable liquid scattered around, ambient aggressive plant life that will grapple anyone who gets too close, levers and buttons scattered around that do who knows what. all sorts of things you can do to keep things fresh and interesting every fight. And for monsters, at those levels i suggest using a lot of homebrew monsters with inflated hitpoints and relatively meek attacks sprinkled with a few glass cannons and/or specialist type enemies. this partially mitigates the offense>defense problem of 3.5 and makes fights stay interesting longer than 1 round.

I'm sure there is plenty of other stuff too. best of luck!

[DarkSoul]

The Quicksilver Hourglass in Dungeon Magazine is level 30, and The Razing of Redshore is a level 20-21 also from Dungeon.

Going back to 2e, The Labyrinth of Madness can easily be scaled to whatever level you want, but it was intended for very high level parties. Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Dragon Mountain were also high level. For Return to the Tomb I worked up a CR 28 Acererak when I was considering converting the entire adventure. Dragon Mountain is a meat grinder if you run it right, but it might not hold up against high level groups in 3e as well as it did in 2e, so that one might need some more work.

[RNightstalker]

The Quicksilver Hourglass in Dungeon Magazine is level 30, and The Razing of Redshore is a level 20-21 also from Dungeon.

Going back to 2e, The Labyrinth of Madness can easily be scaled to whatever level you want, but it was intended for very high level parties. Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Dragon Mountain were also high level. For Return to the Tomb I worked up a CR 28 Acererak when I was considering converting the entire adventure. Dragon Mountain is a meat grinder if you run it right, but it might not hold up against high level groups in 3e as well as it did in 2e, so that one might need some more work.

I'm actually working on converting Dragon Mountain to 3.x and there's no way it'll hold up to epic characters.

To answer the OP, epic campaigns need to be tailored to each party. Most epic abilities will break a dungeon and there has to be an agreement about how to not break the game. The epic game I was running was becoming so labor intensive on my end I started deciding "these bad guys are going to hit on a 17+ on the die, and their saves will be +whatever" and I would only really flesh out the boss at the end of the dungeon.

[Erelamar]

Most 3.5 modules around this level are not particularly good... at all. And I have to disagree with taking away any of the PC's abilities (divination, teleporting) to make it more challenging. You really want the players to make full use of their characters if they've invested all this time into getting to the level where they can use these abilities consistently.

I would rather take something pre-existing that was clever and just crank up the power level till it matched the party. Something like the Sky-Blind Spire (http://blog.trilemma.com/2016/04/the-sky-blind-spire.html) is a good start:



There's an extradimensional, MC Escher feel which is always nice in high-level modules.
The whole locale can be placed anywhere and is set up to be a MacGuffin. So you can have the tower's super spell do whatever the campaign requires to see to its conclusion.
It has a puzzle to solve in how to go about charging up the tower to get it to activate: going through the rooms in a specific order, which requires the players to climb/fly out certain windows and enter others.
It can be solved with stealth or subterfuge: turning the inhabitants against each other to create a diversion so the party can slip through each room in order. Or they can just bash their way through everything.


As for upgrades, its not particularly hard:



The goblins can be replaced with the party's long-term enemies/rivals, using whatever methods (not necessarily the blue color blindness) they want to sneak around the tower. Their base could be in a magnificent mansion or something a little ways off from the tower, rewarding players who search around looking for magic and maybe setting up an ambush.
The giants can be the new enemy faction and de facto rulers of the tower, pilfering the dead archmage's belongings. If you're limited to core just slap 12 levels of sorcerer or cleric onto four cloud giants (makes them CR 17 each), or preferably you can go with Eldritch Giants from MM3.
The roost of seven dire pelicans can be, I don't know, Arrowhawks? Something big, not too smart, aggressive, and flying. Not a problem for the whole party, but a separated character alone may have trouble. Bonus: they could be charmed/mass suggestioned/kited into the giants to cause distraction.
The undines are more of an RP encounter I think. You could buff them a little bit by making them water genies or some kind of exotic elementals or something. They judge the party's motives and give them good or bad advice.
Etc, etc.


Either way, switch out the instances of treasure for things suitably worthy of an epic finale (i.e. the Study could be filled with several magical tomes, manuals, and spellbooks along with maybe maps identifying several of the campaign's important location for the nostalgia factor). Create unique expensive items you would never normally give out:

As a reward for going through the front doors for some reason, replace the ring of water walking on the corpse with an Intelligent Ring of Three Wishes with only 1 wish left. It's been hiding from the giants with nondetection and sees the party as the way to complete its special mission (whatever that is). It has a very high ego score. Also, it is loath to actually use its last wish as it would then become nonmagical and essentially die, but will do so under the right circumstances.
But, yeah, that's how I would go about making a final, high-level adventure without frying my brain trying to do everything myself.

[Biggus]

Thank you for the responses all. Sorry it's taken a while for me to read through them properly, the players in the other campaign I'm running suddenly decided they'd had enough of being heroes and have become mercenaries instead, which has caused quite a bit of hurried rewriting...

I don't have the problem that the PCs will simply use teleport, divinination, free resurrection etc all the time as there's no Cleric, Wizard or Sorcerer in the party, so if they want those they have to buy scrolls and have Bard UMD them. Not that the cost is prohibitive at epic levels, but it does mean they won't be using them casually to solve every little problem.


Most 3.5 modules around this level are not particularly good... at all. And I have to disagree with taking away any of the PC's abilities (divination, teleporting) to make it more challenging. You really want the players to make full use of their characters if they've invested all this time into getting to the level where they can use these abilities consistently.

I would rather take something pre-existing that was clever and just crank up the power level till it matched the party. Something like the Sky-Blind Spire (http://blog.trilemma.com/2016/04/the-sky-blind-spire.html) is a good start:



There's an extradimensional, MC Escher feel which is always nice in high-level modules.
The whole locale can be placed anywhere and is set up to be a MacGuffin. So you can have the tower's super spell do whatever the campaign requires to see to its conclusion.
It has a puzzle to solve in how to go about charging up the tower to get it to activate: going through the rooms in a specific order, which requires the players to climb/fly out certain windows and enter others.
It can be solved with stealth or subterfuge: turning the inhabitants against each other to create a diversion so the party can slip through each room in order. Or they can just bash their way through everything.


As for upgrades, its not particularly hard:



The goblins can be replaced with the party's long-term enemies/rivals, using whatever methods (not necessarily the blue color blindness) they want to sneak around the tower. Their base could be in a magnificent mansion or something a little ways off from the tower, rewarding players who search around looking for magic and maybe setting up an ambush.
The giants can be the new enemy faction and de facto rulers of the tower, pilfering the dead archmage's belongings. If you're limited to core just slap 12 levels of sorcerer or cleric onto four cloud giants (makes them CR 17 each), or preferably you can go with Eldritch Giants from MM3.
The roost of seven dire pelicans can be, I don't know, Arrowhawks? Something big, not too smart, aggressive, and flying. Not a problem for the whole party, but a separated character alone may have trouble. Bonus: they could be charmed/mass suggestioned/kited into the giants to cause distraction.
The undines are more of an RP encounter I think. You could buff them a little bit by making them water genies or some kind of exotic elementals or something. They judge the party's motives and give them good or bad advice.
Etc, etc.


Either way, switch out the instances of treasure for things suitably worthy of an epic finale (i.e. the Study could be filled with several magical tomes, manuals, and spellbooks along with maybe maps identifying several of the campaign's important location for the nostalgia factor). Create unique expensive items you would never normally give out:

As a reward for going through the front doors for some reason, replace the ring of water walking on the corpse with an Intelligent Ring of Three Wishes with only 1 wish left. It's been hiding from the giants with nondetection and sees the party as the way to complete its special mission (whatever that is). It has a very high ego score. Also, it is loath to actually use its last wish as it would then become nonmagical and essentially die, but will do so under the right circumstances.
But, yeah, that's how I would go about making a final, high-level adventure without frying my brain trying to do everything myself.

Ooh, I like this one, especially the little touches like the windows that look out in different directions. I might well use a modified version of it, thank you :smallsmile:

[Calthropstu]

I figured if a dungeon is epic, it'd at least be able to walk instead of crawl. Just saying...

[Remuko]

I figured if a dungeon is epic, it'd at least be able to walk instead of crawl. Just saying...

I like the idea of an animated dungeon as an epic monster. i need to think about this more

[rel]

'The monster is so large it is mechanically treated as a dungeon' is a good approach to epic threats

[Calthropstu]

'The monster is so large it is mechanically treated as a dungeon' is a good approach to epic threats

Yeah. When a monster is big enough that his pores act as caves, stabbing him with a pointy stick will be utterly futile. There were monsters in 2e planescape bigger than planets. Don't care how sharp your sword is, it's not feeling what equates to a spec of dust being smacked into him.

[Falontani]

Eberron has a city in the demon wastes that is supposed to be an overlord, which in Eberron lore are immortal creatures that when are actually successfully killed just come back, and are supposed to be God tier in power. It turned a platoon of ancient wyrm dragons that were attacking it, into dust zombies that it controlled and sent off to attack the dragons that sent the platoon, in under a minute. The only reason it doesn't do the same to your party, is because it doesn't think your a threat. The fiends inside however, would love to brutally kill, torture, enslave and worse these heroes for even daring to step into the city.

[Bohandas]

Was there ever one published for 3E? Failing that, for any other edition? Or has anyone ever made one themselves?

Quicksilver Hourglass. Dungeon Magazine issue 123

[Biggus]

Eberron has a city in the demon wastes that is supposed to be an overlord, which in Eberron lore are immortal creatures that when are actually successfully killed just come back, and are supposed to be God tier in power. It turned a platoon of ancient wyrm dragons that were attacking it, into dust zombies that it controlled and sent off to attack the dragons that sent the platoon, in under a minute. The only reason it doesn't do the same to your party, is because it doesn't think your a threat. The fiends inside however, would love to brutally kill, torture, enslave and worse these heroes for even daring to step into the city.

Can you remember the name of the city or the overlord?

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine had a few. (They worked together to cover each adventure, generally.)

Razing of Redshore for 20-21, Storm Lord's Keep for 21+, and Quicksilver Hourglass for 30.

[Falontani]

Can you remember the name of the city or the overlord?

Both are Ashtakala.
http://keith-baker.com/ashtakala/

A bunch of the city's lore is spread across different books and editions, but his blog has the most complete and contains some of the Kanon that really brings it together.