Familiar with the mega-dungeon?

[pogre]

In my home town in the 70's there were at least three campaigns based around "named" dungeons. I ran one to pull players in and then reverted to a more episodic style of play. I am enchanted with the idea of returning to a megadungeon and started running one for my boys a few weeks ago. I think Necromancer did a solid job of capturing the feel of these megadungeons with their epic product a few years ago.

 

[Orius]

I started in 2e, but I still knew about mega-dungeons. I've known about Undermountain and probably good old Castle Greyhawk almosts as long as I've been playing. I even designed part of a mega dungeon for my 2e campaign world, but I never got around to using it. Even today, I have at least a spot or two in my campaign world where a mega-dungeon can go.

 

[HalfOrc HalfBiscuit]

I started in 1977 with OD&D (white box plus the Greyhawk supplement) which my brother bought for my birthday, having himself encountered the game at university.

I certainly started with multi-layered dungeons, both because that what's my brother's experience was and because it seemed to me to be what the books encouraged.

However, I fairly soon moved on to trying to provide a context for such dungeons - and then moved away from them to what I then considered more realistic set-ups. All - I'm pretty sure - before becoming aware of any published modules or other support (this is in the UK, where shops stocking D&D were pretty thin on the ground).

 

[Raven Crowking]

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.

(1) Don't confuse spin-off conversation with original intent.

(2) The poll provides a body of people to specifically ask about their experiences, and see how they intersect (or do not) with my own. It also tells me whose opinions I need not seek, or need not give weight to, when I am trying to figure out where I came in contact with that infectious meme.

For the record, I started with Holmes Blue Box and Keep on the Borderlands as my first taste of D&D, and AFAICT I was the person who first purchased the game in my local area (then Hartland, Wisconsin), at least among my local peer group. There was only one other DM that I knew of in the earliest of days, and in later conversation he explicitly told me that he bought the game after seeing me reading the Holmes book in the school library.

Prior to that, I was aware of a TV spot, but I do not believe it discussed multilevel dungeons, and a small article I read focusing mainly on Car Wars in an Upper Michigan newspaper at my grandmother's is Chatham.

I didn't go to conventions, except once (and that was later). It was only many years later that I even saw the original booklets.


RC

 

[Plane Sailing]

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.

Don't put words into peoples mouths, please. Stick to making your own points.

Thanks

 

[Plane Sailing]

I started with OD&D in 75/76 and for us everything was 'megadungeon'.

Gradually we started to have adventures outside the dungeon, and campaign worlds followed, but the in our early days multi-level dungeons was the norm (and considering comments I used to read in APAs at the time it was pretty much the norm in most places I heard of too)

Cheers

 

[Doug McCrae]

My group started with Moldvay BD&D and AD&D. We never played megadungeons. From comments others have made they seem to be much more a 'founding father'/OD&D/Holmesian concept.

Looking back on the material available to us then, we could have learned about megadungeons from early White Dwarf articles such as Roger Musson's Dungeon Architect series. There were only one or two articles like that though, compared to a much larger number of modules and magazine scenarios, so its easy to see why the latter was our model.

I think the concept of the megadungeon had fallen into [Ariosto]desuetude[/Ariosto] by the early 80s, given the trends towards more realism and expanding the scope of the game to whole worlds rather than town and dungeon. When you have a world with many possible adventure sites you no longer need a single massive dungeon to cover the D&D level track.

 

[Jack7]

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.

I've got both of those books. One for my daughters, and the other for the boy we are going to adopt.

This may be a little off topic but your comments reminded me of how "integrated" my gaming hobbies were with everything else I did. When I was a kid I was constantly on the move, doing something. My parents encouraged this, and it is my nature anyway I suspect. I'd rather be dead than bored. The constant refrain in my household was, "go do something." Though I rarely had to be reminded to tell the truth. My old man ran his own business, raced, played ball till older, was involved in several groups, charities and fraternal organizations (still is), was reserve military, helped run the church, farmed, built things like our house, etc. So I guess I got some of that from him.

If I wasn't playing ball or sports (I played football, soccer, and baseball, and ran track or distance) I was out in the woods, where I spent a good part of my childhood and teenage years. (I was also a Boy Scout by the way.) Or I was in a CAP (Air Force Auxiliary) exercise or SAR mission, or taking trips, or in science camp or down at NASA, or fighting with my friends or camping out or playing games, or reading, or writing, or on my ten speed or riding motorcycle, tracking animals or hiking with my dogs, or something. It was really hard to just sit on my butt and do nothing. The idea of watching TV was something you did if you were injured sick, or the weather was bad, or you just had nothing else to do.

To me all of the things I did, work or hobby, gaming (like D&D or Risk or wargaming) or sports, they were all "adventures." Part of my childhood "campaign," though I wouldn't have described it that way back then. I would have juts said, "all the things I do."

The idea that there was some artificial line of demarcation, separating real world adventures from imaginary ones, well, it just didn't seem real to me. And it never really occurred to me because I didn't think in those terms. It was all one long process of the same thing, only the particulars and methods of execution varied. I honestly saw things like wargaming and D&D as encouraging or feeding real world experiences (I didn't think I would have bothered if it was just a diversion with no real world connection to me), and vice versa. I don't know why this thread and your comments made me think of that, but it did. Maybe that's another reason I never thought of imaginary "adventuring" as a series of disconnected fights or encounters or dungeons. We did on occasion "practice fight," have little encounter tournaments. But that was just practice. The idea of D&D being a series of "disconnected encounters" just never would have occurred to me. I'm not saying I think badly of the idea, it's just not the way I was raised or had trained myself to look at the world. To me it was all adventure (in the widest sense of the term), it was all connected, and it all had some kinda larger purpose.

Like I said the idea of disconnected, separate encounters (separate even from a module or dungeon), when I read about it in this thread, as being the norm of play in a role play game, well, it kinda shocked me. I'm not kicking the idea down, I'm just saying it would have never occurred to me that was "play." I would have called that practice or skirmishing. Like ball practice or training for a meet. It wasn't the real thing, but what you did sometimes to prepare.

I started with OD&D in 75/76 and for us everything was 'megadungeon'.

I concur. The idea, like I said above, of not campaigning, but just constantly skirmishing seemed as alien to me as well, Alien. I didn't see the reason for an imaginary fight if it wasn't going somewhere or involved more than just chance encounters. It had to have a goal or something to achieve. I still don't like the idea of wasting time at something unless you get something out of it or something is achieved or something is learned or discovered.

 

[Obryn]

I was aware of them, but I don't remember ever actually playing in one. Or running one, for that matter.

Thinking more about it, it was really just the Castle Greyhawk dungeons I picked up bits and pieces about, largely through name-dropping in MM2 and a few modules here and there. I remember I wanted to buy it, but it of course wasn't even remotely available. But I did end up getting the jokey version! Back then, I loved it. Little did I know it was the source of much rage and anger for Greyhawk fans.

So I guess what I'm saying is that it's more fair to say that I knew about the Greyhawk campaign, and the Castle Dungeons as a feature of the campaign. But I didn't know it as a normative feature of AD&D.

-O

 

[Hussar]

I got into the hobby about 81 or so. Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City were probably the formative modules we played, as well as the Isle of Dread followed by far too many to remember.

LIke Obryn, I recall snippets from here and there, The Dragon, the Monster Manuals, things like that, but, I can't ever recall it being a very obvious thing.