Cooperative World's Largest Dungeon

Hey. Anybody else besides me love giant dungeons? Not feel like waiting for AEG's World's Biggest Dungeon?

Then come with me and help me make the World's Largest Cooperative Dungeon!

Inspired by Fieari on This Thread and helped out by my buddy Rakeron(who says he'll contribute too), I created this small blurb.

Castle of Leeds, the Mad Archmage

Built into a lonely mountain ages ago, the Castle of Leeds stands as a testament to the fact that madness and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. The castle's architecture extends back into the mountain and though it's gates and walls show wear and tear from the century long war waged between Leeds and the other great Wizard Lord of his time, Ticeas, those who have ventured inside say that it is still as strong as a castle built today.

Leeds was considered a madman among mages, dabbling in all manners of unnatural things, from magical crossbreeding to necromancy, chronomancy, trapbuilding, and demonology. Some of the spells he discovered or created are still in use today, while some have faded into the mists of time. It is said he built up into the mountain, a story confirmed by the few adventurers who have come out of their adventures in there alive; however, none have ever explored the entire thing, so none may say how far up into the mountain Leeds built. However, since it's been empty, all manner of creatures have taken up residence on the mountain, and the creatures found within seem to be resistant to the effects of the sands of time, though none may say exactly why...

The mountain that Leeds built his castle into has since become a home to many creatures

Basically, I'm trying to give an opening to allow anything to be thrown in here. Leeds was a great man; terrible, but visionary, so just about anything could be tossed in here. I know I'm up for it; what about anybody else?

I don't have floorplans or anything done up yet, just the idea behind it.

Also, any open content is usable, just please put it into stat block form; don't assume other people have the books these monsters or magic items appear in.

P.S. Yes this IS so that we can use Piercers and other stuff from the Tomb of Horrors, not to mention all those schnazzy monsters from Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary and the Creature Collection Books.

Also forgot to mention that I'd love to see some homemade stuff like creatures(I know I'm gonna be doing it) and maybe magic items. I'll admit that I'm not the greatest with organization(my talent lies more towards creating; my players'll tell you that I'm the classic absent-minded writer) so if somebody else wants to do that(Trainz, if you're interested I'd be greatly relieved as you already have experience in this having handled the excellent Cooperative Dungeon projects) so I can focus on just creating, that'd be awesome.

Hi Blackshirt !

Has the originator of the cooperative dungeon concept on ENW, I'd like to share a few things with you, that might help out, or that you can simply ignore.

Hope you don't mind !

First of all, I hope you're bracing yourself, because you're putting yourself in overwork mode. The first CD we did (and the only one published so far) has only 30 rooms, but it took a LOT of work to get it done. Not even counting the work of the contributors (which took many weeks, if not months, to get 30 rooms done), there was a developing and editing team comprising more or less 6 people, a few of which are professional editors that edit and proof-read for a living, and of course Mark Clover from Creative Mountain Games, who with editing, did the layout, PDF conversion, and is publishing it. And it took us months to achieve that.

30 rooms.

Delivering a product with hundreads of rooms would take... MANY man-hours to produce, usually in the scope that only a profit based gaming company can deliver.

Coordinating the room submission process would also be quite an endeavour. It's taken me a lot of time with CD1, CD2, and CD3. Granted, with each new CDx, the process is more refined and elegant.

All that said, I think that all projects of passion are worth doing. I just want you to realise that you will have to really brace yourself for a lot of work for many months to come.

If you don't intend to deliver a polished product, and don't really care about the layout and spelling mistakes, but just want to do a compilation of rooms in a file with maps, then it would be much easier to do the post-compilation, and maybe this is just what you want to do. In that case, your project might be more possible.

But to get people to give you hundreads of rooms, still this would take quite a while. For example, for CD1, I produced a detailed map with room numbers, and it took well over a month just to get 30 submissions. Granted, CD2 and CD3's rooms were ammassed within one week each, at 15 rooms per dungeon.

I know that this may come down like I'm trying to rain on your parade, but that would be far from the thruth: having done the process myself, I'm sharing with you my experience so that you get an idea of the project you're getting yourself into, so maybe those pointers will help you out better prepare yourself, and make you more likely to succeed.

[Han Solo] Good luck, you're gonna need it ! [/Han Solo]

Thanks for the advice Trainz.

What I'm thinking at this point is more a compilation of little dungeons that all fit within the framework of this dungeon built by the mad archmage than a finished product. I really meant for it to be for people who don't wanna wait for World's Biggest Dungeon, and who want to show off their creativity and dungeon design skills. I know I've got some cool levels in mind, as does RakeRon.

I'm sure we're not gonna get to the size of World's Largest Dungeon(especially seeing as how not many people are showing an interest in the project) but I'd like to at least try; if me and RakeRon have to do it on our own, so be it.

All I'm saying: Maze made out of Walls of Force.

What you should produce is a template graph paper like in the old days of D&D. The paper has 'marks' where doors/halls connect, it will keep things standard.

Blackshirt, if you want, I can do the maps for you. Tell me how many rooms you want, wether you want them featurless or with stuff in the rooms, and if you want the maps to span a single level, or be multi-leveled.

It wouldn't take me long... all the rooms would be numbered.

Gah! What a project! No offense, but I don't think I want to be the one editing this sucker. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out, though.

MerakSpielman said:

Gah! What a project! No offense, but I don't think I want to be the one editing this sucker. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out, though.

Click to expand...

LOL !

Yeah... I thought you would react like this to this project (as I did) !

Blackshirt, let me present to you one of Cooperative Dungeons super-editors, Merak Spielman. He spent a LOT of time editing CD's.

But, again, if you don't mind too much about the final look of the thing, why not !

Trainz said:

Blackshirt, if you want, I can do the maps for you. Tell me how many rooms you want, wether you want them featurless or with stuff in the rooms, and if you want the maps to span a single level, or be multi-leveled.

It wouldn't take me long... all the rooms would be numbered.

Click to expand...

What program do you use to generate them Trainz? I'm asking because I don't think I'd like to have them all numbered together, but more like each level has it's own numbering system(this'll also help if others wanna toss in on this).

You and Merak wouldn't be interested in doing up levels too, would you Trainz? I'd love to see what you guys could come up with.