Tyrael
2008-09-04, 04:08 PM
Heya, folks. I've got my first DMing session of this fall semester coming up this Friday night, and while I did a BIT of prep-work over the summer, I never finalized the nuts-and-bolts of everything. I'm working on prepping a dungeon for the party to run through, very loosely based on the concept of a dungeon I read about somewhere, where there's a big prize in the center of a giant circular dungeon, and each “slice of the pie” is self-contained, with each slice containing an adventuring party. So it's kind of like a giant rat maze, and occasionally the slices open up, allowing for rival parties to compete or cooperate in order to get to the goal in the center.
Outline so far:
Players start at 5th level in a town. Party consists of a Human Rogue2/Swashbuckler3, Human Cleric5, and Human Monk5.
The King of the nation is holding a contest open to all comers. Contestants must survive a gigantic dungeon while fighting off monsters, traps, and other adventuring parties. At the end of the dungeon lies a magnificent treasure.
What the players don't know is that once they get to the center of the dungeon (guarded by a boss that I'll probably model after Screaming Mantis from MGS4), the King greets them with a smile and congratulates them, but then an assassin teleports in and kills him. The treasure is disposed of in some manner (it might not be, I haven't decided), and the players must escape the dungeon alive.
Once they surface, they find that the King's assassination has sparked an attack from a rival country, and then they are thrown into a mercenary-commando-styled war zone (inspired by the “Fantasy Warfare” chapter in Complete Warrior). After maybe one or two missions (tops, due to time constraints) the enemy army wins the war and the PCs are forced to flee into the countryside. At that point, an NPC will come along and say “yo, the BBEG's castle is that way!”
The PCs journey to the castle, go through it, defeat the BBEG, save the world, The End.
So anyway, right now I'm trying to put the big circular dungeon together, and I've never been very good at dungeon-building, especially with layouts and things. Anyone know of any good published 5th-level dungeons that I might be able to steal? At least the floor plans or something?
Outline so far:
Players start at 5th level in a town. Party consists of a Human Rogue2/Swashbuckler3, Human Cleric5, and Human Monk5.
The King of the nation is holding a contest open to all comers. Contestants must survive a gigantic dungeon while fighting off monsters, traps, and other adventuring parties. At the end of the dungeon lies a magnificent treasure.
What the players don't know is that once they get to the center of the dungeon (guarded by a boss that I'll probably model after Screaming Mantis from MGS4), the King greets them with a smile and congratulates them, but then an assassin teleports in and kills him. The treasure is disposed of in some manner (it might not be, I haven't decided), and the players must escape the dungeon alive.
Once they surface, they find that the King's assassination has sparked an attack from a rival country, and then they are thrown into a mercenary-commando-styled war zone (inspired by the “Fantasy Warfare” chapter in Complete Warrior). After maybe one or two missions (tops, due to time constraints) the enemy army wins the war and the PCs are forced to flee into the countryside. At that point, an NPC will come along and say “yo, the BBEG's castle is that way!”
The PCs journey to the castle, go through it, defeat the BBEG, save the world, The End.
So anyway, right now I'm trying to put the big circular dungeon together, and I've never been very good at dungeon-building, especially with layouts and things. Anyone know of any good published 5th-level dungeons that I might be able to steal? At least the floor plans or something?