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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ibrandul" data-source="post: 8220622" data-attributes="member: 6871736">I’m up against this problem right now, as I prepare to start running a campaign of Princes of the Apocalypse.For those unfamiliar with that adventure, it’s a sandbox multi-dungeon crawl. It’s a great book that still holds up in a lot of ways, but it deserves its poor reputation, which rests on two things: the absolutely DM-unfriendly way the info in the book is organized (which I won’t go into here), and the problematic nature of sandbox dungeon crawls.There are a bunch of dungeons you can access in any order (within the chapter they’re currently in; for example the first chapter is levels 3 to 6). The problem is, each dungeon is designed for a specific party level. So at the start of the campaign, when the party is  at 3rd level, they could go to the 3rd-level dungeon—or they could easily wind up in the 6th-level dungeon instead. There’s nothing to stop them, and, at least in the module as written, there’s nothing even to signpost that they should do this one before that one.It seems that many DMs running PotA choose to railroad their parties into doing things in level order. I don’t want to do that, but I also know my players can’t possibly take on a level 6 dungeon at 3rd level.What I really want is a “level adjuster” for the campaign, so that each dungeon would include info on how to run it for a party of each level that could access that dungeon. This would make thematic sense (unlike the Shire/Moria example in the OP) because the cults in charge of those dungeons are supposed to be growing in power as time passes. You hit the fire cult first? OK, that gave the air cult more time to beef up.But that’s a ton of work—I find that it’s harder to bump a whole dungeon up three levels than it is to just make a new dungeon from scratch.</blockquote>

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