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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 9286399" data-attributes="member: 6796661">I completed a 5 year mega-dungeon campaign (Rappan Athuk) in December last year. I used VTT tools.  We started in person and I had a horizontal display that I would display the map with FOG of war and remove it as they explored. We used miniatures on top of the digital display. When I had to start running games online, I used Foundry.  I never make players map. Instead, if a character has cartography skills, it let the revealed areas stay revealed after they move through the area. Resource management, again, is simple if using a VTT.  Weight, ammo, encumbrance is all tracked by the digital character sheet. Lighting, vision, etc. also handled by the VTT. I know many will feel that this makes D&D play too much like a video game. But not from my perspective. Instead of spending time on mapping, manually tracking resources, and figuring how far characters can see, the players can instead focus on planning, solving puzzles, social interactions, combat, etc. It keeps the game moving and avoids a lot of the grind involved with playing through a megadungeon with pen and paper. It does take away from some of the mystery and fear involved in running a dungeon TotM. I love running small dungeons TotM where they are just one location in a larger campaign setting. But with a megadungeon, TotM gets old quick and frustrating for most players.  Besides, even with VTT tools, a megadungeon like Rappan Athuk is so huge that there is still much unknown and trying to understand how everything fits together still provides a puzzle for the players and one more interesting than mapping room by room with pen and pencil. For PC death, I started the campaign with a funnel. Most players had at least 2 surviving characters.  Most played the same character exclusively, but some would play with both, swapping them depending on what the group's goals for a session were. The inactive PCs would be back at the stronghold, taking care of things there in the background. If not played and gathering XP, if they needed to come into the game because the primary character died, or they wanted to play the backup character, the backup character would be leveled up to one level below the lowest level character in the group.  When we had a guest player join a session, they would just roll up a character before the session and level it up to one level below the lowest level main group member's PC. Part of what made a 5 year campaign that took place almost entirely in one megadungeon work (for our group) was slower leveling using GP for XP, with occasional milestone leveling. We also used MCDM's Strongholds and Followers rules for the party to build and improve strongholds, and hire troops to protect it and secure areas they've cleared. I also used a homebrew fame/infamy/reputation systems with patrons and factions (based heavily on an article published in EN5ider).  This tied the parties goals and activities to the larger world and sopped up gold. Lastly, I made sure that if the players tired of the megadungeon, they were not locked into it, so that we wouldn't have to just end the campaign and start a new one if they lost interest. Rappan Athuk is part of Frog God Game's Lost Lands setting and I have a LOT of material for it. Also, there are lots of hooks to other areas throughout Rappan Athuk and I added further hooks. Even with that, we played for 5 years almost entirely within Rappan Athuk with only the rare side quest or trip to other areas.</blockquote>

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