Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7878082" data-attributes="member: 4937">Buy in from your players.  The main advantage of the megadungeon format is that it allows you to organize a haven/delve format that can accommodate many players, not all of which need be available on a given day.   A pure haven/delve format has the rule that you always return to the surface at the end of the session.  But even if you don't want to have that constraint, what you do want to have is a group willing to spend a whole campaign on what is essentially a single aesthetic of play - dungeon delving.You can theme it however you like, but you will want to have as much variety as feasible because you're already tightly constrained by the fact that you are in a dungeon environment.  So I would not suggest doing everything to a single theme.  You can and it's not hard - a massive catacomb beneath a city will suffice - but it is likely to get redundant in play.   Instead, you'll probably want to have several different dungeons that have grown together over time.   The classic layout is a Ruins above a Basement which leads to Caves, Vaults, Mines and so forth.   Then you have one or more factions which have colonized and repurposed a portion of this area, or if the caves are large enough, have perhaps been living there all along.   But any combination is possible depending on what you want to do.If you have a plot, typically, your hook is set and your plot driven by the interplay of factions on the surface in the Haven. Often there is a Foozle that needs to be recovered, or there is an Ancient Evil that someone wants to awake, or there is a Portal to be opened, or what have you. And in a simple version you have one faction that is trying to do something and another faction that wants to stop them. The basic twist is to have the players initially working for one faction, only to discover that they have been deceived entirely about the motives of that faction.You can also have factions in the dungeon, but I find that this is less reliable. You never really know if the players are going to care about allying themselves with anyone, and the factions in the dungeon are realistically going to tend to have somewhat alien and private motives. But if you have a cave themed dungeon, you can always have a faction of potential allies deep within it, be it svirfneblin or myconids, whose goals will align with the players to some extent.There are a number of realistic underground constructions of large size - quarries, mines, catacombs, sewers, basements, viaducts, etc.   There are even real world underground cities historically, and of course more so in a fantasy setting.   There are also many sorts of caves, from ice caves to lava tubes.  So you just put a few together - a cursed city that has been buried under the ice for a thousand years.   Or they mined too deeply and broken into an ancient cavern where foul things lived.  Or whatever.   Come up with some ideas and I can help you justify them.  It is afterall a fantasy world.Honestly, in ratio of time spent in creation to play time, running a megadungeon is probably one of the easier things a DM can attempt.  While the up front costs can be enormous,you can get a heck of a lot of play time out of a dungeon in the long run.  It's much more efficient in the long run than running smaller dungeons, detailed plots, event based scenarios, and so forth for a given level of quality.   The real trick, and this is the rub, is you have to be really spatial and good at mapping.   A really good layout takes a lot of work.   If you aren't completely confident in your mapping chops, I'd strongly suggest you spend a lot of time playing with random generators, both those available online and the one in the back of the 1e AD&D DMG.   While neither is good enough to just random up and go with, you will get a lot of ideas and a good sense of what you can do to add variety and interest to the map.   If I could sum up a good map in one word it would be, "Asymmetry."  Force yourself to avoid symmetry, and come up with reasons why left is different than right and back from front.</blockquote>[/QUOTE]

Verification