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Thread: Dungeons in the Big City?
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2014-01-10, 11:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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Dungeons in the Big City?
So a significant portion of the next campaign I'm running will take place pretty much entirely in one big city, but I still want there to be dungeons. I mean actually dungeon-crawly type stuff, not just a dude's house or something.
What ideas do people have/have used for dungeons located in a city?
A few of mine
1) The sewers. Boring but always an option
2) A bunch of adjacent buildings with the interior walls knocked out to create one complex.
3) Undersides of the city docks.
A related question. What are some believable reasons for an encounter in one room not to trigger all the others? City spaces tend to be more compact and it's difficult to figure out why one combat wouldn't alert the whol building or whatever.Spoiler: Campaign JournalsRising Star [PF Campaign Journal] (game ongoing, journal over probably)
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2014-01-10, 11:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Underground tunnels for smuggling.
Natural caverns under the city.
Houses that are bigger on the inside.
Catacombs and tombs.
Aqueducts.
As for not alerting people, background noise works even if there's not much intervening space. Especially if the ambient noise sounds kind of like people fighting anyway.
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2014-01-11, 12:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
4) Back ally of some unruly neighbourhood, bonus if it's the territory of some local gang/thieves guild
5) Abandoned area (See Flint, Mi or Camden, New Jersey)
6) Abandoned Warehouses ala City of Heroes
In medieval times, walls are actually made out of stone and therefore provides more insulation to sound.
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2014-01-11, 03:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Dungeons in a large city is easy.
There's the obvious sewers, as you already noted.
There's compounds owned by wealthy persons or businesses.
There's burial catacombs.
There's large municipal buildings. It doesn't have to be underground to be a dungeon you know.
There's naturally existing caverns under or just outside the city.
If it's a capital city there may be an actual dungeon beneath a monarch's castle or as the underground portion of a prison complex.
There's the halls of an academy or mages' tower. The latter of which could be -massive- beyond anything you might expect from the outside (yay dimensional magic).
A series of alleys in the poor part of town can make a fine, if poorly appointed, dungeon.
There could be a full-scale necropolis in a large enough city. You could put several dungeons beneath there.
I'd assume there are more that I'm not thinking of on the spot as well.Last edited by Kelb_Panthera; 2014-01-11 at 03:02 AM.
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2014-01-11, 03:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
As you said in your frist post, a lot of cities are literally build on top of themselves, so you might find old houses and even streets still intact below the surface, with people knocking out walls and using them for whatever purpose suits you.
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2014-01-11, 03:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
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2014-01-11, 04:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
An example from my Dark Sun gonzo science-fantasy setting:
The City of Tyr is built over itself, again and again, over thousands of years. Beneath the streets lie passages, bricked-up cellars, tunnels, sewers, and entire buildings and buried streets, filled with vermin, the occasional monster, and the secret halls of thieves' syndicates, assassins' guilds, elven black markets too black for the Shadow Square, and the Veiled Alliance itself.
Deeper down is Under-Tyr, level after level of ancient city built over itself. Many sections and levels have been repurposed by various powers, from the Sorcerer-King (whose tower and ziggurat are both rumored to connect to the Under-City) and his Templars to Mages and Necromancers (many now centuries dead... or worse). More accessible tunnels have been turned into crypts and necropolises, and sealed up when the concentrated energies of death grew too strong and the dead began to walk; now the riches buried with the mighty and powerful tempt tomb-robbers.
There are entire levels of great machinery of copper and lead, pipes and pumps that siphon moisture from moisture-traps far afield in the Tyr Valley and store it in artificial reservoirs beneath the city, from whence the working wells in the city above draw it. Many an adventurer is said to have gotten rich by finding an untapped reservoir or water-tank and setting up his own water-merchants' shop; though most prefer the quicker route of looting the collected water, then disassembling the machinery to sell the metal and parts... which has created entire flooded levels.
The halls and caverns of Under-Tyr contain countless relics of ages past: temples, bunkers, arcane machinery, and weapons, ray-guns and force-shields, gilded androids and flying-machines, and ancient spells inscribed on metallic tablets. The dangers are endless: ancient necro-splicers' vats disgorge undying Vat-men and Artificial Men and worse creatures; old summoning circles hold demons waiting for the delicate patterns to be disrupted; and monsters slink in through passages that were dug too deep and connected to some of the caverns of the Underworld, where nameless beings gnaw at the roots of mountains.
In the city itself, the Ziggurat of the Sorcerer-King has been finished; thousands of slaves have watered the mortar with their blood, and countless spells have been woven into the stones. The tiers are watched over by living statues and patrolled by Templars, who also perform rites at the shrine on the top; no one would be fool enough to attempt to enter there, but there is persistent talk of secret ways built into the lower tiers by infiltrators from the Veiled Alliance among the slaves, and of hidden entrances through the Under-City. No one knows exactly what lies inside the Ziggurat, but tavern-talk is full of stories of rooms filled with precious metals and gemstones, and of magical laboratories and libraries like no other. Even the secret to the Sorcerer-King's power and immortality is said to lie within.
The Sorcerer-King's compound and the White-Gold Tower are known to hold countless treasures, but the dangers are terrible: the King's own students, the Defilers, and his High Templars guard the place, along with a cadre of Half-Giant slave-soldiers, and an endless array of spells, traps, and magical guardians and monsters. But if there truly are secret ways to enter through the Under-City or the Ziggurat, a group of enterprising thieves might make themselves rich beyond their wildest dreams... or a group of fearless rebels might strike a blow to free the city from immemorial tyranny.D&D retroclones:
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2014-01-11, 04:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Sharn, Eberron, has a whole undercity, the Cogs, with sewers, machinery, slums, volcanoes, everything you want... (Plus, it is built on top of older cities.)
Some cities might have more or less official access to the Underdark (if you're playing in Faerun) or similar subterranean world.
Really, all sorts of people* might have reason to maintain underground labs, workshops, warehouses, power plants, sacred sites, training facilities, vaults, prisons, or even farms or gardens.
If you want something really unique: A city might be built upon the carcass of a legendary demon that has turned to stone long, long ago (but might still come back to life again.)
As to your bonus question: Yeah, ambient noise from machinery, water, wind or even volcanoes works. But really thick walls (something you'd want in an underground complex) and long corridors and sturdy doors go a long way, too.
BTW I don't think you'd say sewers are boring if you had been to some of the bigger ones in real life...
* Monsters are people too!
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2014-01-12, 07:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Massive old Prisons.
Lordly manors that have been taken over by crazy illusionists.
Thieves hideoutsAside from "have fun", i think the key to GMing is putting your players into situations where they need to make a choice that has no perfect outcome available. They will hate you for it, but they will be back at the table session after session.
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2014-01-12, 08:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
A prodigious serial-killer/rapist might have dug out an underground tunnel to store his victims (who might be dead or merely captive).
A cult might illegally modify their residence (perhaps a tenement?) to include extra shoddily-built wood staircases, connected rooms, and fill the place with explosives, cultists, and bodies.
Shadowrun is an RPG which takes place in the far future, and most of its encounters are in urban environments. You can try looking there for ideas.
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2014-01-12, 08:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
I had an exploded laboratory expose a secret laboratory underneath it in my currently ongoing city campaign. Water came up from underground flooding parts of rooms, and the waste tunnels from the exploded labs allowed the small-sized PCs to crawl around and get a head start on exploring the other rooms.
You could also make things happen on the city outskirts, in the slums or forests/mountains/swamps/what have you outside. Or things underground, once again.My webcomic!
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2014-01-12, 08:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
rpg.net has an awesome column "A Bit of History" that delved into things like this at a time, it's finished now but it's really a treasure trove for anyone looking to be inspired by "real" history
Real world archaeology is somewhat prosaic and humdrum. Most of what we have found beneath the streets of Indianapolis are the common debris I have mentioned in many columns. Sometimes you find things that are odd, such as a butcher shop with a basement sixteen course of bricks deep, in a neighborhood that was once rather poor. That's a lot of construction, but I am sure there is a perfectly reasonably explanation for that. Also there is nothing occult or bizarre about the intact pig's skull we found on the floor of the basement, empty eyes pointing towards the door. The butcher shop was less than a yard from boarding house whose residents were no doubt transients of one kind or another. There's a whole Call of Cthulhu adventure there, surely there is.
The full column from which I got the quote is here
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2014-01-12, 09:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
An abandoned (or not) underground city beneath the area that used to be a dwarf ghetto. Because it was just silly that the humans weren't using that space, so the immigrants dug it out.
Literal dungeons under the palace. Poorly-sealed escape tunnels optional.
Rooftops. Not a dungeon, per se, but you could probably make a low-level dungeon crawl type of adventure out of it (until the PCs get flight).
A paranoid noble built so many secret passages and hidden rooms that there's practically an entire second manor hidden inside the walls.
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2014-01-12, 09:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
City watch barracks, full of holding cells and security checkpoints. Your choice if the monsters are the guards or the prisoners who've broken out.
In bigger cities, an actual army barracks, or a prison.
Universities, especially ones that teach magic, might have basements where they keep the dangerous live specimens.
Museums might have rare and exotic things hidden in the exhibition storage--according to a friend who worked for a while at the American Museum of Natural History, it gets really creepy in the storage areas--for a better idea, read the book Relic, which my friend says contributed to their looking for a new job.
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2014-01-12, 10:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Oh. got another one. The largely deserted, quarantined area of a particularly large city. Plague or undead or the like wipes out everything in the area that's been sealed off and the remaining structures and creatures make up a dungeon of sorts; one with a lot of random nothing and myriad points of entry and egress from any given "room."
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2014-01-13, 08:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Currently working on a campaign (first session on Friday!) that's mostly set in a large city situated in a large volcanic crater at the edge of the ocean that's been partially flooded. A thousand years ago or so, the ancients flooded/sunk the city to stop something big bad and left only a few "islands" and the rim of the crater, which still accounts for a lot of space. Underneat it ill, though, are dozens of buildings that have been mostly drowned and are now filled with the leftovers of an older, more powerful civilization that people are just discovering.
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2014-01-13, 10:55 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
The original Neverwinter Nights probably offers the ideas you want. The game has the following dungeons on its first act (which is in the nominal city):
1: A massive academy, with all its rooms, menageries, corridors, storage areas, etc.
2: A prison. With a zero-human-rights-allowed underground complex.
3: Sewers used by pirates as a hideout.
4: Various abandoned buildings being used as hideouts for criminals.
5: A nobleman wizard's mansion.
6: Several Noblemen's large houses (guards, pets).
7: A zoo.
8: Large catacomb complexes.
9: A temple used by an evil cult.
10: A wizard's tower.
11: Tight slums, packed with maddened beggars and thugs.
----
Then we go to Luskan on another act, where we get:
1: A government building.
2: The palace of one of the government officials.
3: Sewers.
4: More of the previously listed.
-----
And the final act, back in Neverwinter gives us natural caverns, a warzone, the full complement.
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2014-01-13, 12:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Like DonEsteban pointed out, the city of Sharn has tons of dungeon areas, in my last campaigns the PCs went through:
Riverside mud caves that had been partially excavated into some old ruins,
A bank and the high security vault beneath it.
Sewers leading down to a different part of the undercity to track down someone who had run off with some stolen goods.
An old abandoned church and bell-tower in a run down area of the city.
The offices and laboratory of a madman.
There are dozens of areas in the city they didn't touch that are perfect for 'Dungeon' crawls
Fallen- A whole district where a giant crystal tower came crashing down, mostly inhabited by crazy people, rumoured to be haunted, filled with a maze of razor sharp crystal shards from the fallen tower.
The Cogs/ lava pools- miles of underground forges, foundries, factories and fire.
Old Sharn- The original hobgoblin city, sandwiched somewhere between the sewers and the cogs, lots of tombs to be raided.
The necropolis/city of the dead. An actual necropolis, even more tombs to raid!
That's just the overtly dungeon-like areas, you can also have adventures in warehouses, prisons, insane asylums, haunted houses, insular neighbourhoods, magical alleyways, monstrous hives, wretched hives. etc. It certainly helps when the city extends a few miles upwards and downwards.
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2014-01-14, 09:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Building on the Neverwinter Nights mention, there's always good-old Undermountain... which is a massive complex under a mountain (hence the name). Waterdeep is built on the slopes of that same mountain. The complex is run by a crazy old wizard with a penchant for dimensional and summoning magic. Also connected to the Underdark for additional amusement.
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2014-01-14, 12:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Go read up on the catacombs of Paris, and imagine a necromancer.
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2014-01-14, 12:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Most of the larger cities in my game are built on the site of older settlements; some having been inhabited for most of 20,000 years. So there is always something someone is digging up or trying to clear, or even seal up. With the constant wars raging and plagues in the land there is a given chance the city may be underpopulated or even overcrowded as folks flee the countryside from the fighting. Overcrowded cities are always a bad thing and heightens the frequency of diseases.
Clean water and sanitation are always major concerns for the rulers of cities that at least care about the general health of their people. Remember: even slaves need to be treated and cared for so they can be productive and their owners profit from their labor. If not why bother keeping them?
Organizations such as thieves guilds, and things out of the Complete Adventurer (Daggerspell Guardians, Eyes of the Overking, Shadowmind, etc) are constantly either establishing themselves in the city, fighting to keep their strongholds, or have left abandoned bases behind. [Lots of opportunity to have adventurers trying to find an old base lost under the city with just some old notes and a madman's preaching in the town square].
Throw some Undead factions under the city: check out Lurkers in the Shadow or other such groups from Libris Mortis. Have groups either fighting back the insidious and slow plans of undead in the city or conversely aiding those plans. Vampire groups, a lich wanting to subvert the living population to his will, etc.
The lower levels of the ruined cities underneath could very well be linked into the Underdark. Some groups may have already cleared and fortified paths down into the Underdark regions either to trade with the folks that live deep below the city, or to try to remove them, or stop the denizens fo the Underdark from roaming the streets at night and snatching citizens.
And if all else fails to spark the creativity: throw a few planar portals or artifacts into the city. The wall behind the temple to Wee Jas will allow someone to cross over into the Tarterus when the new moon is directly overhead sort of thing. Adventurers need to find out if it is a one way trip or if they can return....
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2014-01-14, 12:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
I'd second the Tyr model.
Theres a really good Groundhog day story called Mother of Learning which utilizes something similar.
The city itself was build atop ancient ruins and started out as a community of researchers and mages trying to uncover what lies within said ruins. Only the ruins are their own eco-system and are much larger than at first suspected so even after decades if not centuries, only a small part has been uncovered due to the dangerous nature of the ruins with its traps and creatures now native to it.My first foray into homebrew: The Circuit Mage
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2014-01-14, 12:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Just make the city REALLY old, like thousands of years. Imply that it has been built and rebuilt time and time again over the centuries, always adding the new city ontop of the old.
You end up with a situation like Seattle or Jerusalem, where there are large underground structures from the previous incarnations of the city. Bam, there are your dungeons, ancient underground structures that used to be part of the city housing gods know what. Bandits, mummies, artifacts, cthulu, you can literally put anything down there and it will make sense in context.May I borrow some bat guano? It's for a spell...
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2014-01-14, 12:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Originally Posted by GolemsVoice
As you said in your [first] post, a lot of cities are literally build on top of themselves, so you might find old houses and even streets still intact below the surface, with people knocking out walls and using them for whatever purpose suits you.
That, in fact, is exactly what I'm planning for my own city campaign, with a little recent geological history thrown in.
Originally Posted by Slipperychicken
Shadowrun is an RPG which takes place in the far future, and most of its encounters are in urban environments. You can try looking there for ideas.
(I wouldn't say it's far future, though...I think 2050s or so is the timeline.)
Originally Posted by hamlet
A thousand years ago or so, the ancients flooded/sunk the city to stop something big bad and left only a few "islands" and the rim of the crater, which still accounts for a lot of space. Underneat it ill, though, are dozens of buildings that have been mostly drowned and are now filled with the leftovers of an older, more powerful civilization that people are just discovering.pillage your concepttake inspiration from this is quite strong.
Originally Posted by GungHo
...there's always good-old Undermountain... which is a massive complex under a mountain (hence the name). Waterdeep is built on the slopes of that same mountain. The complex is run by a crazy old wizard with a penchant for dimensional and summoning magic.
And don't forget Skullport, which is certainly seedy and subterranean enough.
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2014-01-14, 01:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Don't forget you can always build up. The dungeon is actually a tower or a very large warehouse. No one notices it for there is a giant silent image / programmed image cast on it hiding it from view. Since no one interacts with the image no one saves against it.
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2014-01-14, 01:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
I love rooftops for low-level encounters -- a jump-from-roof-to-roof chase sequence (sometime with appropriate skill checks) it an oft used but still fun staple. In terms of "a chain of encounters, without alerting other areas" then roofs that are separated by some amount could prevent enemies from being "aware" and roofs that are higher than others could enable "enemies are aware, but unable to interfere"
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2014-01-15, 08:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
My favorite are the essentric lords who build their mansion using Winchester as their patron saint (seriously, check out his mansion if you haven't before). That's practically a dungeon and the idea of secret passages is perfectly legit.
I had a low-level dungeon crawl take place in a tall hedge maze behind the castle once. PCs were trying to escape the castle guards too, so climbing up the hedges to get a look around was a sure way to get your head skewered by the king's crossbowmen.
If the owner of the building is a magician of some skill, then it's possible that the encounters are things like animated furniture, constructs, and spirits bound to specific areas. Stuff like that have limited intelligence so they may have been commanded to only guard specific rooms. Thus if a fight breaks out in the kitchen with the cooks, the animated suit of armor two rooms over may not do anything because the fight is outside its orders of "Guard this music room".
Course few things boggle a party like watching an armoire patrol a hallway...Last edited by DigoDragon; 2014-01-15 at 08:54 AM.
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2014-01-15, 09:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
Wow...all these gamers and nobody's mentioned Undermountain...
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2014-01-15, 10:31 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
I did something similar to this once. The city had three layers to it, called Overcity, the Core, and Undercity, and then there were the depths below it. It was set in a psionic campaign with the psionics opacity ruleset, and the ruins that the newer city was built on were actually magical, and forgotten. THe opacity made it so that the magic would be more alien and dangerous, which is what I aimed for.
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2014-01-15, 10:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Dungeons in the Big City?
In addition to all the greats suggestion you have here, a wizard could have a portal to and from a far away dungeon.
Last edited by ElenionAncalima; 2014-01-15 at 10:55 AM.