Familiar with the mega-dungeon?

[MerricB]

Hmm. I happened upon D&D in 1981 or 1982 - I can't remember which now. I do know that my introduction came through (concurrently) AD&D and Moldvay Basic.

The problem is this: I can't remember if I knew about the megadungeon then.

I think I did. I think between the random tables in the AD&D DMG and the descriptions of adventure design in Moldvay, we worked out that there was the possibility of really large dungeons. Certainly, my brother was doing a lot of solo adventuring through a "megadungeon" randomly created...

However, in play, we were sticking to the published adventures, and there was nary a megadungeon in sight. To us, Temple of Elemental Evil seemed like a megadungeon when it was published. In retrospect, it wasn't.

Cheers!

 

[jdrakeh]

I am not wondering how widespread the campaign dungeon was. I am wondering how I became aware of it myself, and trying to gain clues by finding out who else was aware of it, and how they became aware of it.

But you had no idea that they were what the original players considered to be a normal part of a campaign milieu?

That's all I want to know.

So you either want to know how people became aware of the campaign dungeon or whether they consider it to be a normal part of campaign milieu. . . yet neither of these was the question asked.

 

[Jack7]

I think I have a clue in my own case.

Before role play gaming I came out of wargaming. Going back to when I was seven or eight years old, sometimes playing and sometimes observing war-game recreations of famous historical battles and campaigns while under the tutelage of my uncles and great uncle.

So my experience may be "older" (in that respect) than many of you, and different from many of you. I was aware of store-bought modules (for D&D), and sometimes used them in a form that was adapted to my setting and campaigns.

But from the very beginning I started out playing D&D with the assumption that I was creating my own world and that my world was to be used to host coherent, large-scale campaigns of interconnected scope and interest.

Most of my buddies played this way too, designing their own worlds and matching campaigns within those worlds. The worlds and the campaigns that took place in them were sort of inseparable. Though one buddy used Greyhawk, he created his own campaigns in that setting. Everyone else made up their own worlds and campaigns.

I've never really thought about it in this context before but I suspect I (and we) did it that way because of our familiarity with war-games, and the associated extended and complex campaign ideal. (We often even played Risk this way, creating campaign types and we would have all day and all night Risk games with shark-steaks and fish fries and bottle-rocket fights and night-time ambushes of each other to conclude the games. (There was no LARPing back then but we would camp out and then break into teams with wooden weapons right before sun-up and then attack each other with ambush assaults and guerilla operations. Those were great times to be a kid because you could do all kinds of things that nowadays, unfortunately, kids can't do because everyone is so geared up by terrorism. Not that I'm not in favor of maintaining good security against terrorism. I am. It's just that nowadays kids can't be as relaxed about what they do because of somebody sees them running around the woods in camo attacking each other somebody will call the cops. But I grew up in a running fight in the country and we all loved it. A certain kind of innocence and fun has been lost and to me camp-outs, fights in the woods, D&D, Risk, wargaming, going fishing, tracking animals, frostbite and exposure, waking up being attacked by wild pigs, it all bled together. They weren't separate things, they were all part of the "campaign" of being a kid and enjoying yourself and exploring things. It's a shame some of that has been lost. But I digress.)

To me to be playing, wargaming or role play gaming, meant to be "on campaign," which meant involved in a large-scale, complex operation of battles (or adventures in RPGs) which were components of a larger war (or campaign in D&D terms).

Also the idea of campaigning to me always presumed an objective or set of objectives. You didn't just campaign to go a'Viking. You campaigned with an objective you intended to achieve.

To me wargames were strategic (it was all about the group objective - the army or military group objective) and the RPG was all about tactics (that is about the small party or individual objective) but both were ultimately about the objective and the strategy (the overall goal).

Occasionally we'd game just for the hell of it, or for comic relief, but in the main, we gamed to a purpose. To reach some goal or get killed trying to. Figuratively speaking.

Edit: Come to think of it I've often wondered if people who had prior, or simultaneous experience with wargames and role play game might not have different experiences with either or both than those with just experience in role play gaming.

I've also often wondered if people who grew up in the country and people who grew up in the city might not have totally different role play gaming experiences due to their differences in environment (it seems a logical conclusion anyway.)

I sat in on one game in college, run by a kid who had grown up in Atlanta.

Part of the adventure was wilderness and his descriptions of how things operated in the woods was laughable to say the least, though I don't think anybody pointed out his errors. You could tell the closest the guy had ever come to the real wilderness was traveling the back roads on the way to Disney World. I didn't dislike the guy at all, he just had no idea of what survival or the wild was like in any respect.

 

[pawsplay]

Well, from way back there was The Lost City (B4). Although only the top (pyramid) layers are detailed, the game included a map and broad sketches to turn the city into a campaign-length mega-dungeon, since the setting was literally a buried city plus some underground caverns. That was 1982. Using defeating Zargon and his cultists as the campaign end-point, you would be good up to about level 10-12.

 

[Storm Raven]

The results of this poll, plus Hussar's poll on play styles, leads me to the following conclusions (which are as reliable as the data they are based on, which comes from internet polls, so take that for what you will):

1. Many people in the "old days" knew of, or at least had heard about, the idea of a huge, multilevel megadungeon. A possible source I would throw out there for this information would be games like Rogue.

2. Most people didn't play using megadungeons. In fact, actual megadungeons seem to have been quite rare in the "old days". Maybe Rogue may have seemed like a fun diversion on your Apple IIc, but wasn't worth bothering with at the gaming table.

 

[Storm Raven]

Well, from way back there was The Lost City (B4). Although only the top (pyramid) layers are detailed, the game included a map and broad sketches to turn the city into a campaign-length mega-dungeon, since the setting was literally a buried city plus some underground caverns. That was 1982. Using defeating Zargon and his cultists as the campaign end-point, you would be good up to about level 10-12.

I will note that this was released after the Blumes took over TSR. According to Ariosto, this cannot be used as evidence of how "old school" people played, since they were just stuffed corporate shirts.

 

[Ariosto]

Jack7, your digression reminded me of something. When I was a kid, a Boy Scout's Handbook (at least one even then slightly old) was a marvelous thing. I don't know what the Scouting book is like today, but some folks have produced somewhat evocative volumes titled The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls.

The former certainly seemed to go over well with my nephew, and here's a funny thing: especially judged by the covers, they look almost as if they had been published about a century ago.

 

[Ariosto]

If I may be permitted to speak for myself, "according to Ariosto", B4 is an excellent work that I highly recommend.

 

[Dykstrav]

I've always dug the idea of a megadungeon for a casual, beer-and-pretzels game where continuity and ongoing narrative isn't as much a priority as is getting the group together to play. Such games were particularly common in my high school days, I played so much that the DMs often made up the dungeon on the spot as we played. Hell, when you're playing four or five days out of the week, a megadungeon was a great idea because it was so easy to run with.

I've run a few 1E and 2E games in a single, large dungeon. I've done a single 3E game like that, but Rappan Athuk Reloaded made me really want to do it again.

I have noticed that newer players tend to enjoy smaller dungeons that can be explored and cleared within a single session or two. I'm considering trying a 4E megadungeon, but I'm not sure that it'd be this group's cup of tea.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't remember when I first heard about actual megadungeons, but I did pick up Ruins of Undermountain pretty much right when it came out (though have never used it for anything). I later picked up Myth Drannor and got good use from that; I suppose, if ToEE doesn't count, that makes it the only "megadungeon" I've ever actually tried to run even if only in part.

The concept of the endless dungeon occurred to me shortly after I started playing. Shortly after that, I realized it'd probably be kinda dull after the first while, and abandoned the idea.

Lan-"Tomb of the Lizard King was quite big enough"-efan