Making Mega-Dungeons...

[Greatwyrm]

I don't think it's the construction of the dungeon itself that's the root of the problems you're describing. Maybe it's the circumstances that lead the party to the dungeon.

If you don't want the party searching every single room and killing everything down to the mice, give them a time limit. A tough one. Make them skip over things and move on quickly. Get in and get out in X hours or someting bad happens.

When the Fellowship entered Moria, it wasn't a cash-finding expidition. It was a race to the other side, both to deliver the ring and to escape the oncoming hordes of orcs and goblins.

Give them a reason to move fast. If you just put more stuff in there, they'll just take more time looking at/killing it.

 

[Greatwyrm]

Woo hoo! Make my post a double!

 

[Hand of Evil]

Break the dungeon into groups/sections/areas connected by paths. Build the ecology and history. Next explain why adventures/monsters keep coming back to it.

In the history, as this was the dwarf age and the did this. Then the orcs came and did this, the the dwarfs came back, orcs one more time, then the humans, then the big bad.

 

[Sixchan]

Re: Re: Making Mega-Dungeons...

This doesn't sound like Moria or a Mega-Dungeon. Sounds like a relatively small dungeon, keep, or castle the party can take over. When I think of a Mega-Dungeon, I think Moria (LOTR) and Undermountain (FR), which cannot be "cleared out" by, well, anyone really.

Otherwise, I think the advice given so far is pretty good.

Umm...That's what he said. You missed the start of the sentence:

In the standard D&D dungeon (the Forge of Fury, the Crater Ridge Mines, etc.) when the adventure finishes the PCs have - more or less:

In very large dungeons, supply is one of the most important things. All those baddies need food and water.

 

[Sam Witt]

Skip the Mega-Map of Doom

While this is somewhat antithetical to the 'I map every stinkin' room and the tiny corridors in between and when I'm not mapping tiny corridors, I mark the wind currents in the dungeon' school of thought for DND, I'm just about to the point where I never want to see another 'dungeon map' in the classic style.

Here's why:

1. They create boring filler space. Eventually, all maps become strings of skill checks made by the rogue between the cool parts of the dungeon. These skill checks are tedious for everyone else and generally don't add much to the game.
2. Architectural diagrams are boring. When you read a book, and the heroes venture into a deep cavern or structure, they aren't mapping where they're going. They're using dead reckoning and their keen Direction Sense to find their way into and out of the dungeon. Having a big map just slows things down, when you could more easily say, "You journey through winding caverns for three hours . . ."
3. They encourage door bashing. Players see a door, they bash a door and spend a lot of time digging around in the room - even if it's an empty storeroom or otherwise ho-hum location. Dungeon maps tend to have a lot of rooms to add 'verisimilitude,' better known as, "There are six barracks here, and they have, um, some furniture and stuff, and ah, the monsters aren't here right now, 'cause you killed 'em all a while back."
4. They make it harder to impose a sense of scale. "The dungeon of the fire lord is enormous - entire armies have been lost within its confines, swallowed up by the enormous corridors." You want to map that? I don't. But I do want my players to adventure there, to sneak from room to room . . . but I'm getting ahead of myself.
5. They eat up development time that is usually wasted. You make a cool dungeon with nifty rooms and hidden chambers. Your characters kick open a few doors, then bulldoze their way to the bottom without ever finding the secret doors that lead to your cunning secondary dungeon. Bleh.
   [/list=1]
   
   If I were going to design a mega dungeon, I sure wouldn't map it out. I'd make some cool areas that players could find, and a general schematic of the dungeon as a whole (showing distances between spots, and that's about it).
   
   Throw in some killer natural challenges (cave-ins, waterfalls, odd pockets of gas) to block access to some areas, or at least make them more challenging to get to, and use these as landmarks.
   
   Then design the areas and describe them. Create general rules for each area, and a few cool battlemaps that can be used and re-used if an encounter occurs. The idea is to get the characters to the cool bits without making them slog unnecessarily through the crappy, boring bits which most dungeons are just full of.
   
   Hmm, this is getting longer than I thought - must be time to put out a book on mapless dungeon design.
   
   Sam

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

If you're looking for hints on mega-dungeon design, you could do worse than pick up the old 1E Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, or the 1E adventures D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth and D3 Vault of the Drow. Those underdark adventures are essentially dungeons on a massive scale, with the key arreas developed and long passages in between where mostly nothing happens, but you could always drop something in -- the sort of adventure Sam is describing.

 

[rounser]

To throw in two unuseful cents, consider the possibility that megadungeons are too much of a good thing. If you truly love dungeon, a lot of dungeon, make a whole bunch of dungeons with different themes, and use the effort that way. Variety staves off boredom, and a change is as good as a holiday.

You might even want to consider outdoors dungeons, like the evil druid's magical hedgerow maze, or urban dungeons, like the vault of the city theives guild. The concept of megadungeons being so cool ("It's so big and deadly!") seems to obscure the finding that they're generally pretty dull in play. Campaigns stagnate inside megadungeons as you wave goodbye to plot, roleplaying and missions...I guess that's the best piece of advice I can offer on the topic - if you do build a megadungeon, remember to incorporate these elements in multiple ways inside the dungeon, rather than just for the reason to enter. (And, remember that "negotiating with the factions" and "PCs could disguise themselves to get past the enemies" doesn't count in these departments. You can do that in every module with as much depth as Keep on the Borderlands.)