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="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 7878209" data-attributes="member: 53980">My limited experience with running a megadungeon is giving each level a theme.My players seemed to enjoy the one I ran. In fairness, it was optional side content to the campaign, which was more sandbox style. With the first party, they delved a few levels into it but were more concerned with goings on in the overworld. However, when they retired the party around level 11 (the druid had discovered a sacred grove and chose to protect it full time, and the rest of the party decided to help him so they retired too), the players brought in a new group whose primary motivation was to fully delve the dungeon.It was a living dungeon. When they discovered it, they were told (by a monk who was keeping an eye on it) that it seemed to be growing and that sometimes monsters would emerge to snatch people.Each level had a different theme. The first one was pretty standard fare. An ogre overboss and his minions. I think the next level had weird, mutated goblins with crystals growing out of them. I tried to make each level a little weirder than the last.Every few levels (3 maybe?) they would discover a secret staircase that lead all the way up to the entrance (this was important so that they were not constantly tediously retreading old territory - some of that is good but you don't want getting to the latest level to take longer than exploring that level). For these earlier levels, it was sufficient to find the staircase down, although a boss was usually guarding it.Eventually, they reached a point where the dungeon levels were fully realized demiplanes. In one they had to break a three way standoff between dragons that were preying on a tribe of centaurs. In another, they had to deal with the genie leaders of 4 unfriendly elemental factions. For these later levels, a magical key found in that level was required to progress to the next.Eventually they made it to the final level, and discovered the source of the dungeon to be a nascent seed left over from Creation. It was only quasi-sentient, and was blindly flailing about trying to gather the resources to be "born" (which in this case was sentient minds from which to draw ideas). The result of which was the dungeon. The players had the option of slaying it (in which case they would have each received a Wish from the remaining energy) or helping it by telling it what to create. They chose the latter and created their own little sliver of the multiverse. The option was there to travel to their new world and explore it, but they chose to remain in their original world and undertake overworld adventures.</blockquote>

Verification