How to build a dungeon?

[Fieari]

Actually, if you've been building it with local help, the locals may be MORE likely to direct local adventurers your way. You know... to get a return on that investment.

If you're afraid of "Boy Scouts" blowing your cover, make sure you place actual treasure in your dungeon. They'll be legitamately informing adventurers about the existence of treasure. Much like, as you said, a "Gauntet" for cash prizes! With... uh... leathal consolation prizes. Eh, but thems the breaks. Ever read "The Guilded Chain"? (Good book, by the way) Samarinda has something similar... wound a member of this secret society in combat, and take home all the gold you can carry unaided. Fail... and die. The whole city's economy is based around this game, with adventurers comming from far and wide (even though people only win once every year or so, and even then, that's because the odds are artificially inflated in order to attract adventurers... ie, once a year, this society LETS someone win.)

 

[Andre]

My group has recently begun a Reverse Dungeon style game, where the players run a dungeon and wait for foolish adventurers to fall prey to our traps. However, rather than being given a dungeon to defend, we were given a cave to expand into a dungeon in addition to being required to defend it once built.

We all like the idea, but we were a bit stumped as to what the rules were for carving rooms out of solid rock. We looked throughout the DMG, but didn't find anything definitive. In the end, we worked out a system in which we hire peons to hit the cave walls with heavy picks over and over again until a 10' by 10' square loses all of its 900 hit points. When the wall 'dies', we get a 10' square cleared out, and begin again.

The system works, but I wanted to know if there were any better core rules for dungeon building on our scale, or if anyone had recomendations for how to go about it.

Well, realistically, building anything beyond three rooms and a trap should take months (years) and lots and lots of gold. So try approaching this from a different angle.

Your group wants to start up a new business venture (Dungeon o' Death), but lack the capital. You have three options: do the work yourselves, borrow the money, take the money. Doing the work yourselves is going to take a lot of time (and be pretty boring), so let's skip that one. Borrowing the money might work, if the illithid involved will loan it, or if there's an investor nearby who can be convinced. Of course, when someone else provides the money, they want control too. You probably want to avoid that as much as possible.

That brings us to "take the money". Use the resources you currently have to hire some cheap labor to clear passages, widen and shape small areas, and so on. Hire a foreman to see that things get done (offer him a bonus so he actually makes the crew work). Then go out into the world and rip off anything that's not nailed down - in other words, tackle a few dungeons yourselves! Adventurers (successful ones, that is) usually end up with far more money than even the wealthiest merchants, and you have a ready-made investment vehicle to absorb all that excess cash. Even better, some items that may not seem very useful could be invaluable in your dungeon (how about a decanter of endless water trap?) Lastly, those levels you gain while adventuring will give you useful abilities for customizing your very own Dungeon o' Death.

So turn the tables on your GM: make your "reverse dungeon" campaign a normal dungeon campaign for a while. Once you have the resources, trick out the old homestead just the way you want. And watch all those other pathetic adventurers die horrible, gruesome deaths...