Memorizing Large Dungeons

[Nibellius]

Say I want to run a big dungeon with lots of different interconnected rooms (e.g. Sunless Citadel). How do I prepare for it? If my players have something quite linear it's manageable but something like a dungeon or city where they can go in any direction and every third room has ton of stuff in it. I can look up treasure or maybe monsters but, talking about the rooms from the book/notes would be very sluggish.

[Graysire]

I would prepare for it just by memorizing where the things were in my notes, but perhaps you could do it with page markers of some kind? If you wanted to spend the time with an electronic document, a word doc or some such could have links to the note pages of connected rooms.

The page talking about The Hall of Faces could have links to the pages that talk about The Hall of Voices and the Pit of I Scream for example(or whatever the room names happen to be, etc.)

[Thrudd]

I don't understand the question. Don't you run it like you run every dungeon?
You have a map. You have a key and notes that say what is in each area. You should have looked over the whole thing a few times to be familiar with it. You keep the notes in front of you as they run through it, so you don't need to absolutely memorize everything. But it's not like you don't have an idea what's going on.

You ought to have statblocks for all the enemies in the notes, so you don't need to flip through the MM. Having them on separate cards instead can make it easy, too. What other things would you need to flip into the book for? Spells that bad guys or npcs are using? You can prepare for that with flash cards or a quick reference page, too.

[Keltest]

I don't understand the question. Don't you run it like you run every dungeon?
You have a map. You have a key and notes that say what is in each area. You should have looked over the whole thing a few times to be familiar with it. You keep the notes in front of you as they run through it, so you don't need to absolutely memorize everything. But it's not like you don't have an idea what's going on.

You ought to have statblocks for all the enemies in the notes, so you don't need to flip through the MM. Having them on separate cards instead can make it easy, too. What other things would you need to flip into the book for? Spells that bad guys or npcs are using? You can prepare for that with flash cards or a quick reference page, too.

The other school of thought (which I tend to run along) is that there is very little pre-placed anywhere. You have a map. The dungeon has some permanent fixtures, but the rest is just chosen off of a big pre-prepared list of stuff you think would plausibly be in the dungeon. Is it a cult base? Roll up a sheet with stats for three different kinds of cultists and roll some dice or pick an amount to be in the room. They beat them? Let them have access to the permanent fixtures and pick a reward off a loot table you prepared.

[Kyrell1978]

I wouldn't attempt to memorize anything. Have a basic understanding of what is in the dungeon sure but please don't try to memorize the whole thing. Usually the maps are numbered pretty clearly and have the room descriptions handy. Usually when exiting one room and entering another the room numbers should at least be fairly close to each other.

[Jay R]

The skill you want is the ability to talk naturally and quickly from prepared notes.

The only way to get this skill is practice - so do your best, and you will get better over time.

Also, you'll find that skill is very useful in life, as well. I think the ability to run a dungeon from prepared notes helped me develop the confidence and skill to speak up in business meetings.

[Thrudd]

The skill you want is the ability to talk naturally and quickly from prepared notes.

The only way to get this skill is practice - so do your best, and you will get better over time.

Also, you'll find that skill is very useful in life, as well. I think the ability to run a dungeon from prepared notes helped me develop the confidence and skill to speak up in business meetings.

That's true. It is something like giving a presentation from notes. I never thought about the parallel, but I'm sure being a DM does build organizational skills that translate to many professional and academic pursuits.

[LordEntrails]

As has been said, don't memorize. I've never read Sunless Citadel, but here's the way I look at it. Each location entry needs to be standardized (i.e. detailed in a similar manner), if you are using something like a VTT or PDF, then links will be key. The ability to have links between NPC stat blocks, the location details, treasure items etc.

Here's the actual first couple of parts of the advice I provide in my Ultimate Undermountain (link in sig);

What to Read
Not everything! This adventure includes hundreds of location entries and events that even if you read all of them, you couldn't expect to remember them all. So don't bother.

Do read all the entries in this section ("Getting Started"). Pay attention to the Power Groups entry as this entry provides you with the means to add flavor and context to your adventures. Think about how you might want to integrate the adventure hooks with the information on the power groups.

Once you know the adventure hook you will be using, and the entrance that your players will be using, then read the dozen or so most likely location entries that they may encounter. Don't worry if the players go in a direction you hadn't planned, each story entry has plenty of information to keep the game going, but not so much that it will take you significant time to become familiar with a location when the players get there.

Also take a peek at the random encounter table Dungeon Lvl Adventuring Parties. These random (or if you wish, not random) encounters can be woven into the Power Groups and Adventure Hooks to weave a compelling story and plot(s) througout your party's adventures.

[Kaptin Keen]

We had this entire discussion just recently - only for vertical ditto's. Quite a number of people vehemently maintained that you cannot run any sort of (real) dungeon without highly detailed map and plentiful minutia =)

I'm of the other persuasion, having little use for maps, preferring instead to have highly detailed fluff and a few tactical snapshots of where battles will take place.

[CheeseM0nkey]

For any large or complicated dungeon, I find it can be helpful to do a dummy run with fake PCs. Whip up some automatically generated stats of Lidda, Tordek, Mialee, and Jozan using an online NPC generator and send them through the dungeon yourself. Skip the combat, but set up the map as if you were going to run it. Just have your little demo party completely solve the dungeon, moving from room to room. It usually takes less than an hour, and you'll find dozens of quick little stumbles that otherwise would show up during the gaming session. It also helps think like a player thinks, which often means, like other people have already said, condensing your information down to essential details.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

When I used to do amateur theater I overheard a conversation on opening night.

Director: How you feeling.
Lead Actor: Nervous.
Director: Do you know your lines?
Lead: Most.
Director: Do you know your character?
Lead: Definitely.
Director: You'll be fine.

When I run adventures I adopt a similar philosophy. I read through once stopping at key moments to visualize interesting scenes. Then I only pick up the module to check maps, stats, loot lists etc. The rest I just play by feel. The trick is to learn the feel of the dungeon.

If we're talking about Sunless Citadel specifically I would especially recommend this style as there are some early encounters that exist to teach 3rd edition mechanics and are painfully easy for an experienced group e.g one of the first rooms has skeletons armed with bows. It exists purely to showcase the AoO rules and is a 0 damage dealt to the party steamroll. Not much later there's an encounter that is similarly easy if you looted those bows.

[Knaight]

The skill you want is the ability to talk naturally and quickly from prepared notes.

You'll also want the skill to make notes that are particularly amenable to this - talking quickly and naturally off short, clear, easily read notes is a whole lot easier than talking quickly and naturally off notes that resemble module box text.

[Lunali]

The skill you want is the ability to talk naturally and quickly from prepared notes.

The only way to get this skill is practice - so do your best, and you will get better over time.

Also, you'll find that skill is very useful in life, as well. I think the ability to run a dungeon from prepared notes helped me develop the confidence and skill to speak up in business meetings.

Another thing that helps, use the time when the players don't need your input to take note of which rooms are next to the one they are currently in. You don't need to know the whole dungeon at any given time, just the parts that are likely to be needed.

[Misereor]

Read, don't memorize.
Get an organic feel for your Dungeon, and you'll be fine.
Keep a copy of the map and stick a few pins (whether virtual or physical) in it, representing the encounters and the most relevant facts. If you remember those, you'll remember the environment and be able to describe it naturally, without sounding like a 10 year old kid who forgot to do his homework. It also make it a lot easier to remember to grant the two Orcs next door a Listen check when fireballs and cleaving of armor and flesh are going on 30 feet away from them.

Of course the best way to remember your adventure settings is to design them yourself. Most published adventures don't really do realistic adventure settings, with NPC defense plans, realistic architecture or ecologies.

[MoiMagnus]

As other people said, memorizing all that stuff is probably not the best way to proceed, however some DM do really like to have all the detail memorize, because that's their way to proceed, so here is some tips:

1) Read and understand. The key to memorizing huge stuff (such as a multiple pages proof if you doing maths), is to understand how the things is build, and why the stuff is where it is, in order to be able to "recreate it" on live (and check sometimes you've not forgot anything).
-Either in-world understanding: A room may be a kitchen, and a the kitchen is nearby the stocking room, and has a special path to the dining room.
-Either meta understanding: The guard room is there is order to allow infiltration by this door, and have the prison over there. The is no door there because we don't want the PC to loop in the dungeon, ...

2) 3 groups, and chaining. As a rule of thumb, your brain cannot memorize more than 3 things. So package stuff to have 3 (or 2) groups "the entry / the living part / the militaristic part". And then you can mentally subdivide the "living part" into "lord part / servant part / visitor part", and iterate. Because, even if your brain cannot memorize more than 3 things, it can chains information almost to the infinite.
(That's how people how memorize a ton of digits of Pi do, they chain the digits in their head, so they can't say to you which digit is the 25th without saying all the first digits before)

(And if you need more tips, just search on the internet for tips to memorize a full chess board position. That's where I got the second tip)

[Frozen_Feet]

The best way to memorize a large dungeon is to 1) make it and 2) play through it a lot.

So if your starting point is that you're reading someone else's notes from a book, you're already starting off the wrong foot.

So how do you get from there to what I suggested? You need to approach the material as if you're a player. Read room descriptions aloud to yourself. Draw or redraw map segments as if you're going through the module yourself. Make notes. Play parts of the dungeon from the perspective of key NPCs. Make the map key or key NPC relations into a poem or limerick.

Learning and memorization is at its most effective when you can utilize multiple sense and associate them with each other. Just reading through a book in silence is one of the least effective ways.