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="Hussar" data-source="post: 8465133" data-attributes="member: 22779">Riffing off the recent Dungeon of the Mad Mage thread (<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/dungeon-of-the-mad-mage-adventure-or-setting-book.684162/" target="_blank">D&D 5E - Dungeon of the Mad Mage: Adventure or Setting Book?</a>) I thought I'd give a few thoughts as to how to make a mega-dungeon campaign work.  Or, at least how I make it work for me.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  I'm an inveterate dungeon crawler.  I LOVE megadungeons and I look forward to the next time I run one.  But, having done it a few times, there are a few things that I think will really help DM's engage the players and keep them from zoning out.  Because, let's face it, it's easy to make dungeons boring.  Investigating a room for potential traps is fun.  The first time.  Maybe even the third time.  But, after the fifteenth time, it's enough to make me want to dig my brains out with a spoon through my left ear.  So, with that in mind, here are my tips and tricks for running a mega dungeon.1.  Give information to the players.  This is an absolute must.  If the players don't have any idea about what is potentially to the left or right, then it's all just random choice.  That's boring.  Drop maps.  Drop maps with mistakes on them.  Have prisoners give directions and information about what's ahead.  Give the players enough information to let them make a (semi) informed decision.2.  Give goals.  "Clear out the level" is a good goal.  Once.  After the third time, again, repetition kills the game.  Endlessly slogging through the dungeon just to "clear things out" is one option, but, remember, there should be many goals.  "Find the Macguffin" "Find the NPC", "Talk to this or that NPC", "Escort duty", "Hunting a specific NPC" are all great goals that you can mix things up with.  Imagine being hired by the Temple of Gond to delve into the Undermountain to find a specific fresco.  They know roughly where the fresco is, but, they need an exact rubbing of it for some bit of knowledge.  Whatever.  Go nuts.  Heck, if you're doing Undermountain, have Jarlaxle contact the PC's to go talk to the Drow enclave to broker some sort of deal.  So on and so forth.3.  Factions matter.  Having different groups also in the mega-dungeon with their own goals, that might be conflicting with the PC's, is a great way to really make the dungeon pop.  Here's a place where you can just sort of have a bag full of semi-random encounters that you can plug and play as the PC's are wandering around.  4.  Not everything has to be combat.  If the PC's try to talk to stuff, talk.  Again, you want to get as much information into the PC's hands as possible and they're helping you do that when they try to talk to stuff.  Maybe offer to guide them somewhere.  Leave the straight up combat encounters for the monsters and the mad cultists.  If it's got a language and isn't automatically trying to murder anything that comes near, talk to the party.  It will really move things along.  You can always drop in some combat later.5.  Move encounters into the corridors.  This is one of the biggest mistakes mega dungeons make.  All the encounters are in a room/chamber.  My favorite tactic was to start drawing circles around encounter locations.  Whenever the party entered that circle, they spotted some or all of the NPC's in that encounter outside of the numbered chamber.  There's a few of my tips and tricks.  What are yours?</blockquote>

Verification