I see your points completely, but they're still fun to read, at the least. And I do think that Gillespie does a pretty good job with his in terms of the realism and the way they're constructed. One is mostly undead but spread out over a wide area (Barrowmaze). Another is a series of buttes/canyons with lairs in it and a volcano (Archaia). Think of Keep on the Borderlands on steroids. The other (HighFell) is a floating island/plateau with a bunch of wizards' towers, some of which have dungeons. And there are lots of teleporters between them. So all of them have a logic often missing in such things. But that said, the sheer length is too much for us, since we're no longer 14 with infinite time to game. So we'll play a few sessions, then move onto the next megadungeon.
Tree's running Arden Vul, right? I totally want to get in on that, but my wife recently had major surgery so I'm just waiting for her recovery to be a little further along before committing my Monday nights as we have a toddler who requires a lot of wrangling. I actually bought that, skimmed it and decided there was no way I'd ever be able to run it so I sold it (to Grodog, I think). But playing? I'd be down for that. These days I almost exclusively DM so I'm hoping to get in with the Monday night crew soon.
I'd forgotten you were looking at joining us in Arden Vul with Tree at the wheel. Rgr on toddler wrangling. Know your pain on that! Look forward for you jumping in.
Rgr on fun to read, & yes I have idea mined from some of the mega dungeons before.
Rgr on no longer 14 and time to kill playing. ran into that this weekend with my girls and their friend. short notice 'can she spend the night' and then later 'can you run a game(one shot) for us'', lucky C&C is so easy to use and I had Enon Tor easy access, so they had a go at another old classic adventure
Cap K, LOVE the idea of that ! Mass knock, then let Darwin take over.
Rgr on needing a reason and ecosystem. That is why Tree running AV is one I'm enjoying there is at least a historic reason for it to be there and there is an ecosystem going on in it .
"And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows!" - Mark Twain
Forgive all spelling errors.
Knight Errant & Humble C&C Society Contributor
C&C Society
Thought I'd once more necro my old megadungeon thread as I'm well into my C&C conversion of the Undermountain materials from 2e & 5e. So last night I decided to list out the number of levels and sub-levels planned and right now it sits at a whopping 43! And this doesn't include planned side quests to other worlds and dimensions as I'm going to have gates and portals all over so I can make potential use of other settings and published modules, plus my own stuff such as my "Thindrongol" megadungeon for C&C, which is a 20 level complex based on Nargathrond and Menegroth from Tolkien. Right now I have planned links to Dungeon Land/Land of the Magic Mirror, Isle of the Ape, Starship Warden (There's a Spelljammer/Stardock level in Undermountain already), Dying Earth, The Empire of the East/Changeling Earth, and the Purple Planet. The last three are from DCC and add that Sword & Planet angle that I find intriguing but wouldn't want to do full-time. And of course, there are copious tunnels leading to the Underdark so I could potentially make use of stuff like D1-3, "Night Below," and "Cyclopean Deeps."
Who knows if I'll actually finish the whole thing, but this is certainly shaping up to be the Edward Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire" megadungeon in its sprawl and scope. So obviously once we get into it, this will basically be the campaign setting, but I think there will be enough variety to keep it from getting stale. One thing we've found is that the same kind of dungeon (i.e. Barrowmaze) can get to be a slog after several sessions.
Who else has done the megadungeon as campaign and how was/is it?
Only 6 levels mapped, but some of them were rather large. Not presently up on my sites as i am trying to find time to remap and edit the room descriptions.
But here are the old zip files, except level 3, for levels 1 through 6. No room descriptions below level 4 and some of level 5.
I started putting the thumbnail pages up, by first uploading the individual maps one per page; however, this is going to take me a couple of weeks to complete.
My mind is backed up... somewhere. But probably not over the rainbow. More likely in another dimension.
If I post too much just let me know and I'll slow down.
Level one is up, all 9 maps. All links in my navigation menus should be fixed. First level is the first dungeon i ever mapped, and it is in blue/white. When i get the room descriptions, I'll put them up on my site.
The best way to keep track of my website updates is to read the What is New page.
So in an update, I've completed conversion of level 1 of Undermountain from 5e to C&C. The whole level has just 40 rooms, not all of which have monster encounters so conversion took just a couple hours. Last night I decided to fill in and number the blank areas from the original Undermountain boxed set from 2e. And even with not assigning numbers to everything I could, it came to over 400 rooms/encounter areas. Yep, that's literally 10 times larger. Megadungeons clearly aren't what they used to be, kids.
I hand drew a mega dungeon with almost 400 rooms. It was a hanging gardens type pyramid. I lost one of the pages and most of the room descriptions! Curses. I still planned on adding to it to.
And that's over 400 rooms in just one level of the dungeon! It's going to be crazy huge when/if I ever finish it. Right now I'm about 70 rooms into it, but we're playing this weekend with the holiday so I'm not going to be writing anything. Trying to get the PCs to mid levels so they can start the thing.
One of the first people I played with back in the late 70's thru mid-80's Had three mega dungeons; Castle Misbegotten, Wolf Mountain (below the castle), and Janet's Woods. 10-15 levels drawn on that really small grid graph paper...20 squares per inch I think it is. He kept his room descriptions on index cards in index card boxes arranged by level. I think we only managed to explore about half of the Castle and Wolf...and maybe a quarter of the Woods. We did get to see a lvl 86-uber mage fail their save against a basalisk gaze (We'd managed to polymorph it into a hamster before it got all of us before hand). His not-so-nice-twin showed up....broke down laughing...slapped his brother's statue around a bit before do a mass petrification negation spell. (The days of 1e) Fun memories.
"Rolling dice and killing characters since September 1976." "Author of Wardogs! and Contributor to Iron Stars and Starmada-Admiralty ed." "Certified crazy since 2009."
Our Monday night group started playing in Arden Vul a few years ago, but due to real life getting in the way, we didn't get that far into it. Other than that, I've never played in a megadungeon. I was thinking of running Castle of the Mad Archmage for my son, but he wants to move to more city and/or outdoor adventures when we pick up our game again. Oh well...
Our Monday night group started playing in Arden Vul a few years ago, but due to real life getting in the way, we didn't get that far into it. Other than that, I've never played in a megadungeon. I was thinking of running Castle of the Mad Archmage for my son, but he wants to move to more city and/or outdoor adventures when we pick up our game again. Oh well...
I found Castle of the Mad Archmage a bit vanilla. But I did convert the first couple levels to C&C and placed it in the same city as Undermountain (Deepwater in my campaign world). The idea is to use it to help PCs level up to be able to handle Undermountain.
Since it came up, I found Arden Vul virtually unplayable. Cool ideas and fun to read, but damn! Some of those room descriptions are 6 pages long. How can anyone run something like that? If you're going to have that many encounter areas, the room descriptions need to be shorter.
Dragon Mountain box set was probably one of the better Mega Dungeons. Unfortunately, when I tried to run it...my players turned out to be of the rampant murder hobo variety and killed every single NPC with clues and plot hooks towards the actual dungeon/adventure...so they never got out of the start gate. Sociopathic heroes...the lot of 'em. ><
6 pages for one room?!? good grief. Overkill for sure.
"Rolling dice and killing characters since September 1976." "Author of Wardogs! and Contributor to Iron Stars and Starmada-Admiralty ed." "Certified crazy since 2009."
I love the concept of a mega-dungeon, and own Goodman Game's Castle Whiterock, but for well over a decade we don't get together often enough to even really try something with such a long story line. It takes a year or more just to do something as short as TSR's B3-Palace of the Silver Princess.
Maybe when I'm retired?
I was hoping Castle Zazyg was going to me my second mega-dungeon to own, but alas, that never came to pass.
In the words of my good friend Trevor, "Hey, put an arrow in that falling mummy! What could possibly happen?"
Yeah, we've never actually "finished" a mega-dungeon unless you count things like Tegel Manor or Temple of Elemental Evil back in the 80s when we were teenagers. More recently, we'll play several sessions until party deaths accumulate and/or they burn out. But I like reading and writing them so I keep doing it. I'm hoping that my son, who is only 5, will get into playing in a couple years and then I can run some of these for him and his friends. Right now, he sometimes serves as the dice roller when the adults are playing, and he loves looking at the monster pictures. He also like the Hobbit movies, so it's a start. Gotta find DVD copies of the old Rankin Bass cartoons.
