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Frog God Games Announces Rappan Athuk (Complete?) for Pathfinder RPG
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<blockquote data-quote="Philotomy Jurament" data-source="post: 5715620" data-attributes="member: 20854"><p>A megadungeon excels as sort of campaign sandbox. It doesn't give you a story-arc to play, it gives the the backdrop and the tools for creating your own stories through play in the dungeon. </p><p></p><p>It gives you lots of rooms and detail so it can support many and various groups. It can support repeated play. It can support multiple groups within the same campaign. It's not just an adventure, or even an "adventure path," but a place the PCs can return to again and again during the course of a campaign (perhaps often, or perhaps on occasionally). Sometimes they might be going for a specific reason or a specific goal ("retrieve the legendary Sword of Yod, said to be buried with the fallen paladin in the dungeon of graves..."). Sometimes they may just be looking for loot. Sometimes they might simply be exploring.</p><p></p><p>Because it *is* detailed, the very act of exploration is meaningful. That is, the dungeon is <em>not</em> just a place to move through on your way to the next "scene" in the story. The dungeon is also a sort of puzzle that can be explored, mapped, and examined. For example, astute players can discover secret areas and such not just by getting lucky on some dice rolls, but by exploring and seeing that, "hey, doesn't our map make it look like there should be something over here?" A traditional megadungeon is very much about exploration, descending into the <a href="http://www.philotomy.com/#dungeon" target="_blank">depths of the underworld</a> "in search of the unknown." (And in search of fortune and glory, of course...)</p><p></p><p>You certainly could play a dungeon-based game using the approach you describe, but it would be a completely different approach with a different focus on play. Either approach can be fun. (For the traditional exploration-style approach, I wrote an essay on <a href="http://www.philotomy.com/#creating_dungeon" target="_blank">designing a "mythic underworld" kind of dungeon</a> that goes into more details on the design goals, etc., that I would use.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Philotomy Jurament, post: 5715620, member: 20854"] A megadungeon excels as sort of campaign sandbox. It doesn't give you a story-arc to play, it gives the the backdrop and the tools for creating your own stories through play in the dungeon. It gives you lots of rooms and detail so it can support many and various groups. It can support repeated play. It can support multiple groups within the same campaign. It's not just an adventure, or even an "adventure path," but a place the PCs can return to again and again during the course of a campaign (perhaps often, or perhaps on occasionally). Sometimes they might be going for a specific reason or a specific goal ("retrieve the legendary Sword of Yod, said to be buried with the fallen paladin in the dungeon of graves..."). Sometimes they may just be looking for loot. Sometimes they might simply be exploring. Because it *is* detailed, the very act of exploration is meaningful. That is, the dungeon is [i]not[/i] just a place to move through on your way to the next "scene" in the story. The dungeon is also a sort of puzzle that can be explored, mapped, and examined. For example, astute players can discover secret areas and such not just by getting lucky on some dice rolls, but by exploring and seeing that, "hey, doesn't our map make it look like there should be something over here?" A traditional megadungeon is very much about exploration, descending into the [url=http://www.philotomy.com/#dungeon]depths of the underworld[/url] "in search of the unknown." (And in search of fortune and glory, of course...) You certainly could play a dungeon-based game using the approach you describe, but it would be a completely different approach with a different focus on play. Either approach can be fun. (For the traditional exploration-style approach, I wrote an essay on [url=http://www.philotomy.com/#creating_dungeon]designing a "mythic underworld" kind of dungeon[/url] that goes into more details on the design goals, etc., that I would use.) [/QUOTE]
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