D&D General Tell Me About Your Dungeon Centric Campaigns

[iserith]

Thanks.

For clarity for other folks: I am looking for your war stories, not your general advice. I know it may seem like a distinction without a difference, but I prefer to draw my own conclusions. Thanks.

Oh no, you've asked people to tell you about their game? What next? Tell you about their characters?!

 

[Reynard]

I’m currently running a sandbox hexcrawl, but we’ve spent about half of our time in and out of a megadungeon the PCs found, so there’s been a fair amount of dungeoneering. We started out using PF2, but we’re currently evaluating other systems (hopefully OSE). However, I don’t think anything I’m going to say is specific to any system.

I’ve found the Alexandrian really helpful for breathing life into dungeons. Justin’s done a number of articles over the years on them. Some are retrospectives while others are advice. If I had to say any techniques were particularly helpful, it’s restocking your dungeon and using your wandering monsters to keep it always feeling fresh. Otherwise, what happens is your PCs just clear it out, and it feels very rote.

The goal is to make the dungeon feel always dynamic and dangerous. If creatures are moving around, into spaces that were cleared, reinforcing positions, etc; then shortcuts and exploration becomes more meaningful as well as gaining access to other resources (e.g., allies, hirelings, etc) who can help mitigate them when you’re gone.

For example, the PCs once retreated in my game to spend a few days shopping. It took a bit longer than they initially thought. When they returned, I rolled to restock and got “zombies”. I decided a necromancer had moved into the central chamber on the first floor. They fought their way through some zombies and eventually parleyed with the necromancer. He was just looking for treasure too, but he couldn’t find it. That random roll turned into a recurring NPC.

Alexandrian articles I found helpful/interesting:

• Restocking the Dungeon
• (Re-)Running the Megadungeon
• Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster
• The Art of the Key, part 4: Adversary Rosters
• Rulings in Practice: Traps

From a dungeon design perspective, I’ve found it a lot easier to write up my key first before spending too much time on my maps. I start with a sketch of everything, but then I go into keying it before actually trying to draw the rooms. I’ve done it the other way around, but it was really easy to get writers block trying to reconcile a bunch of randomly drawn rooms with a key. I’ll also second thinking about factions and who lives there if you’re doing a megadungeon.

When I first designed the megadungeon for my campaign, I had a very rough idea and figured I could try to make it up as I went along. As it turns out, that’s a terrible idea. I ran out of gas mid-way through the second floor. I had to step back and do the thing I should have done up front. Who lives here? What are their relationships like? What does the group that is using this dungeon for their nefarious purposes do, and what is their interactions like. With that in mind, I had a much easier time actually designing the dungeon.

I also want to point out the Alexandrian’s article on Jaquaying the Dungeon. If you’re doing an exploration-focused game, then your dungeons shouldn’t just be a straight line or sequence of encounters the PCs fight through. There should be multiple ways into and through the dungeon. All that dynamic stuff I discussed above helps make this exploration meaningful. If you found a secret passage or an alternate entrance a few sessions ago, and this session you’ve found a bunch of trolls have claimed the main entrance as their own, then you can use that alternate path to continue into the dungeon (or set up an ambush, etc).

Personally, I only sort of worry about balance. When I was designing for PF2, I tied the “tuning” level to the dungeon level. 1st level was tuned for 1st level parties, 2nd for 2nd, and so on. I also used Proficiency Without Level. You could try doing something in 5e since bounded accuracy should work about the same way. I thought it was fine. I don’t think fights are really the point, so I wouldn’t sweat balance too much. Before you need to worry about high levels, you need to get to them. One thing you may want to consider is tweaking XP progression or how you reward it. In OSE/BX, most of your XP comes from treasure, so if you want PCs to delve into the dungeon (rather than seek out fights), then target your XP rewards on things (like finding treasure) that encourage them to do that.

Thanks for the insights. I will definitely check out those Alexandrian links.

 

[kenada]

Thanks.

For clarity for other folks: I am looking for your war stories, not your general advice. I know it may seem like a distinction without a difference, but I prefer to draw my own conclusions. Thanks.

Just saw this! I’ll leave my other post, so someone may find it useful. I’ve found that system matters. We’re currently doing a one-shot to trial OSE, and my players are much more cautious than they are in PF2. That’s because their characters are so at risk of dying compared to PF2.

Another thing I’ve found that works well (in PF2, OSE, or whatever) is giving the players choices in how they go about the dungeon, so they can find the act of exploration is itself rewarding. When we did Winter’s Daughter, they really liked doing the puzzles and figuring out what was happening there. That module didn’t care at all about balance, so combat was more of a failure state.

 

[Quickleaf]

I am considering building out my next campaign as a mega-dungeon exploration (with a side of boom town political drama, but that's not important right now).

As I do so, I want to hear about your experiences playing or running dungeon focused campaigns. it doesn't have to be a mega-dungeon campaign, but it should be dominated by dungeons. What elements of play did you find helped make the game fun? Which ones made it tedious? If you were a DM, how much did you prep ahead of time? If you were a player, did you notice how much the DM prepped ahead of time? Was it/were they published dungeon(s)? Was it all home brew? A mix?

Any edition, and even non-D&D games, are welcome, just let me know what system you used if it is important in understanding how things went.

Just to get things started, one area where I am concerned, especially if I end up using 5E, is the rate of advancement. 5E is way too fast in a normal campaign and I expect ina dungeon it would be even faster. I want the PCs to sit at their levels for a while, both to use all their toys and to let me use all mine. Relatedly, I am worried about the level ramp in power and that makes me worry about using 3.5 or PF.

Thanks.

I ran a 4e mini campaign entirely taking place in the dungeon part of Dragon Mountain, taking about 14-15 sessions for us to play through. The original dungeon isn't a true mega-dungeon, rather it's just a really immense dungeon built around a single theme: planeshifting mountain of a spellcasting red dragon who had tons of kobold tribes of varying loyalty to her.

My biggest prep step was pre-drawing all dungeon areas to scale on rolls of gaming paper, and keeping those organized in a tube carrying case. Part of this process involved going over the map and making a few adjustments for more egress/entry points, better circulation, and shrinking some of the excessively long corridors (simply for physical play space purposes). There was a lot of pre-campaign prep in that case, both for the conversion effort & for figuring out how to minimize the tedious/repetitive elements, and the main pre-session prep was doing the mapping. Maps made a huge difference.

If you're inclined, you can actually get into the gets of my design process for minimizing the tedious side of the dungeon & adapting dungeon crawl play to 4e over here: D&D 4E - Dragon Mountain (4e conversion - complete!)

 

[Nebulous]

There aren't any "plot appropriate points" in a game without a pre-planned plot, such as a purely exploratory game.

Then do it every X sessions you level up. Or, your level +1, so two sessions in you're 2nd level, and to hit 10th you need eleven sessions. There's plenty of workarounds. However you decide it's DM fiat and not under the control of WotC XP scheme.

 

[Nebulous]

I don't think I've ever run a full, massive dungeon campaign of the sort you are considering. It sounds really fun to me though, and it is something I would like to try myself one day.

 

[Mannahnin]

I am considering building out my next campaign as a mega-dungeon exploration (with a side of boom town political drama, but that's not important right now).

As I do so, I want to hear about your experiences playing or running dungeon focused campaigns. it doesn't have to be a mega-dungeon campaign, but it should be dominated by dungeons. What elements of play did you find helped make the game fun? Which ones made it tedious? If you were a DM, how much did you prep ahead of time? If you were a player, did you notice how much the DM prepped ahead of time? Was it/were they published dungeon(s)? Was it all home brew? A mix?

Any edition, and even non-D&D games, are welcome, just let me know what system you used if it is important in understanding how things went.

Just to get things started, one area where I am concerned, especially if I end up using 5E, is the rate of advancement. 5E is way too fast in a normal campaign and I expect ina dungeon it would be even faster. I want the PCs to sit at their levels for a while, both to use all their toys and to let me use all mine. Relatedly, I am worried about the level ramp in power and that makes me worry about using 3.5 or PF.

Thanks.

I have been running a fairly casual dungeon-centric game since last March, inspired by Dyson Logos' "mini-megadungeon" Dyson's Delve (available complete and free on his website, stocked for B/X) and specifically by the Wandering DMs' excellent liveplay videos from 2019 of their play through the bottom half of the dungeon. In keeping with Paul's approach, I put the Delve in/under Bone Hill, of Len Lakofka's classic module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, replacing the dungeon from the original but keeping the town and local area map, which makes a lovely little local area sandbox.

In the course of running this game I've had two separate small groups of players delving this same dungeon at the same time, as well as striking off into some (relatively short) overland travel and into several smaller dungeons I've placed in the area. Tomb of the Serpent Kings was my first additional hook for the second, less-experienced group of players, and they jumped on that rather than heading to Bone Hill. So they had gained a bit of experience before joining the others in exploring Dyson's Delve.

I've also used Dyson's free mini dungeon Goblin Gully, his Burial Mound of Esur the Red, James V. West's Crypt of the Worm Idol, The Secret of Skyhorn Lighthouse, The Flayed King, and most recently a map of Dyson's for a small island fort that I've repurposed and stocked myself. I've expanded on and re-stocked some stuff, but I've mostly adapted published materials, much of it free.

I had been excited by the idea of running a pretty straightforward dungeoncrawling game with this concept for a while, and pandemic lockdown gave me the impetus. I found the idea of converting my more open-world, greater improvisation existing 5E game to Roll20 or another VTT too intimidating a prospect at first, but this project represented a better way to learn Roll20 using a more limited scope of game. Upload the dungeon maps, the town and local area maps, find/make some tokens, and boom.

I mostly stocked my dungeons with tokens and so forth a level or two ahead of the PCs. I did a bunch of prep up front, and then most weeks needed minimal additional prep. Some needed a bunch, as the PCs found a lead on a new dungeon or something, but often I'd have everything all set up for multiple sessions.

I've been running this as an explicitly old-school game, using Five Torches Deep on the player side and mashing it up with B/X on the DM side and for dungeon exploration procedures. Treasure for XP, using the 5TD xp chart but using normal B/X treasure. I gave higher XP for monsters, taking a cue from OD&D and Wandering DMs. I halved the OD&D baseline award of 100xp/HD, and then I make adjustments as I see fit to monsters based on special abilities or vulnerabilities. This has been nice as a consolation when the players run into some trouble but don't make a big score on a session.

I also use Jeff Rients' Carousing rules. PCs can go carouse like Fafhrd and the Mouser once between delves; spend d6x100 SP (I'm using a silver standard, so this is the equivalent of GP in B/X), gain that much XP. Then take a DC11 Con or Cha check (Jeff Rients uses Save vs. Poison) or I roll on a random table for some trouble or complication, or sometimes something lucky to happen. Jeff also suggests allowing the PCs to gamble more in bigger towns, but as I've been keeping the action local, I let them gamble bigger as they gain in levels, representing knowing more people, having better connections, etc. At 3rd level they can choose to roll a d8 instead, at 5th they can carouse with a d10 if they want.

Using this system the PCs have generally taken an average of around 4 sessions per level. Sometimes a bit less if they get a lucky score or are a new 1st level PC joining up with higher level friends who are delving richer areas than they'd want to risk with just a crew of fellow 1st levelers. I think the pace of 3-4 sessions per level has been pretty great, with I think the highest PC having just hit 7th despite having been energy drained at one point. 5TD only goes to 9th level, so the game has a limited lifespan at this pace, but it's felt good both for me and the players.

I've been very pleased with Dyson's Delve as a tentpole dungeon, being large enough for fun exploration (having a couple of sub-levels and alternate routes to lower levels), but small enough that the players can make meaningful progress on it and even explore a whole level in a single session if they're moving fast.

 

[Nebulous]

I have been running a fairly casual dungeon-centric game since last March, inspired by Dyson Logos' "mini-megadungeon" Dyson's Delve (available complete and free on his website, stocked for B/X) and specifically by the Wandering DMs' excellent liveplay videos from 2019 of their play through the bottom half of the dungeon. In keeping with Paul's approach, I put the Delve in/under Bone Hill, of Len Lakofka's classic module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, replacing the dungeon from the original but keeping the town and local area map, which makes a lovely little local area sandbox.

In the course of running this game I've had two separate small groups of players delving this same dungeon at the same time, as well as striking off into some (relatively short) overland travel and into several smaller dungeons I've placed in the area. Tomb of the Serpent Kings was my first additional hook for the second, less-experienced group of players, and they jumped on that rather than heading to Bone Hill. So they had gained a bit of experience before joining the others in exploring Dyson's Delve.

I've also used Dyson's free mini dungeon Goblin Gully, his Burial Mound of Esur the Red, James V. West's Crypt of the Worm Idol, The Secret of Skyhorn Lighthouse, The Flayed King, and most recently a map of Dyson's for a small island fort that I've repurposed and stocked myself. I've expanded on and re-stocked some stuff, but I've mostly adapted published materials, much of it free.

I had been excited by the idea of running a pretty straightforward dungeoncrawling game with this concept for a while, and pandemic lockdown gave me the impetus. I found the idea of converting my more open-world, greater improvisation existing 5E game to Roll20 or another VTT too intimidating a prospect at first, but this project represented a better way to learn Roll20 using a more limited scope of game. Upload the dungeon maps, the town and local area maps, find/make some tokens, and boom.

I mostly stocked my dungeons with tokens and so forth a level or two ahead of the PCs. I did a bunch of prep up front, and then most weeks needed minimal additional prep. Some needed a bunch, as the PCs found a lead on a new dungeon or something, but often I'd have everything all set up for multiple sessions.

I've been running this as an explicitly old-school game, using Five Torches Deep on the player side and mashing it up with B/X on the DM side and for dungeon exploration procedures. Treasure for XP, using the 5TD xp chart but using normal B/X treasure. I gave higher XP for monsters, taking a cue from OD&D and Wandering DMs. I halved the OD&D baseline award of 100xp/HD, and then I make adjustments as I see fit to monsters based on special abilities or vulnerabilities. This has been nice as a consolation when the players run into some trouble but don't make a big score on a session.

I also use Jeff Rients' Carousing rules. PCs can go carouse like Fafhrd and the Mouser once between delves; spend d6x100 SP (I'm using a silver standard, so this is the equivalent of GP in B/X), gain that much XP. Then take a DC11 Con or Cha check (Jeff Rients uses Save vs. Poison) or I roll on a random table for some trouble or complication, or sometimes something lucky to happen. Jeff also suggests allowing the PCs to gamble more in bigger towns, but as I've been keeping the action local, I let them gamble bigger as they gain in levels, representing knowing more people, having better connections, etc. At 3rd level they can choose to roll a d8 instead, at 5th they can carouse with a d10 if they want.

Using this system the PCs have generally taken an average of around 4 sessions per level. Sometimes a bit less if they get a lucky score or are a new 1st level PC joining up with higher level friends who are delving richer areas than they'd want to risk with just a crew of fellow 1st levelers. I think the pace of 3-4 sessions per level has been pretty great, with I think the highest PC having just hit 7th despite having been energy drained at one point. 5TD only goes to 9th level, so the game has a limited lifespan at this pace, but it's felt good both for me and the players.

I've been very pleased with Dyson's Delve as a tentpole dungeon, being large enough for fun exploration (having a couple of sub-levels and alternate routes to lower levels), but small enough that the players can make meaningful progress on it and even explore a whole level in a single session if they're moving fast.

That sounds awesome. I looked at 5 Torches Deep and was quite impressed. I think 5e or 5.5 or 6e could benefit from some of those exploration mechanics. And yes, leveling up every 3 or 4 sessions is a good middle ground.

 

[J-H]

I ran a 5e Castlevania dungeoncrawl campaign that started at 3rd level and ended with the party hitting 13. They are 3 sessions into the sequel now.
Here's the campaign log.
It's also on DM's Guild.
They did not actually get into the castle until they were 7th level... the first four levels were taking the stealthy approach up the side of the mountain.

I suppose they could have gone back and said "we're going to march right up to the front gate up the main road" but there were plenty of implications that doing so would make them face off with an army of undead, so it never came up.

What elements of play did you find helped make the game fun?
-Terrain variations: They never spent more than two sessions in the same type of area. I didn't use many balconies/arrow slits, but there were plenty of areas with varying height and use of 3D maneuvering at the table, as well as obstacles to maneuver around. After the first session, I don't think there were more than 2 fights back to back that were in fully open 'nothing on the battlemat' terrain.

-Varied enemies, suited to the areas. No slog of "more of the same."

-Each area has its own logic or internal structure and theme.

-Exploration and social challenges to give breaks from combat.

Which ones made it tedious?
Too much time waiting for players to roll dice and figure out their damage numbers sometimes. I'm working on a product for possible KS to help speed this process up some. We are at the table to play D&D, not to spend 2 minutes finding dice every turn and cross-referencing to small print on a character sheet.

If you were a DM, how much did you prep ahead of time? If you were a player, did you notice how much the DM prepped ahead of time? Was it/were they published dungeon(s)? Was it all home brew? A mix?
I wrote the whole thing ahead of time. Plenty of custom monsters, custom items, etc.
I think the players were surprised when they saw how thick my file folder(s) were
I did get a couple of comments that I seemed to be ready for every strange thing they did (I knew they might try to challenge the werewolves to a duel with their leader, I knew they would probably not follow the obvious straight route inside the castle, etc.).

Just to get things started, one area where I am concerned, especially if I end up using 5E, is the rate of advancement. 5E is way too fast in a normal campaign and I expect in a dungeon it would be even faster. I want the PCs to sit at their levels for a while, both to use all their toys and to let me use all mine. Relatedly, I am worried about the level ramp in power and that makes me worry about using 3.5 or PF.
There's definitely less power-ramping. Beyond 5th level, you can have the same content for an entire bracket of levels (6-8, 7-9, etc.) without worrying about exactly what order they get to it in.

Since this was a Castlevania game, each area had an area boss. Kill the area boss, level up and get a free long rest. Outside of that, long rests were very hard to come by due to the 24 hour rule. I leaned into it and mentioned how the Castle was saturated with magic and wealth, and thus offered a fast path for advancement in a world where 5th-7th level characters were normally "high level." It ended up being about 2-2.5 sessions per area/character level and about 22-24 sessions overall. That is a good length for a campaign to last.

 

[Reynard]

I have been running a fairly casual dungeon-centric game since last March, inspired by Dyson Logos' "mini-megadungeon" Dyson's Delve (available complete and free on his website, stocked for B/X) and specifically by the Wandering DMs' excellent liveplay videos from 2019 of their play through the bottom half of the dungeon. In keeping with Paul's approach, I put the Delve in/under Bone Hill, of Len Lakofka's classic module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, replacing the dungeon from the original but keeping the town and local area map, which makes a lovely little local area sandbox.

In the course of running this game I've had two separate small groups of players delving this same dungeon at the same time, as well as striking off into some (relatively short) overland travel and into several smaller dungeons I've placed in the area. Tomb of the Serpent Kings was my first additional hook for the second, less-experienced group of players, and they jumped on that rather than heading to Bone Hill. So they had gained a bit of experience before joining the others in exploring Dyson's Delve.

I've also used Dyson's free mini dungeon Goblin Gully, his Burial Mound of Esur the Red, James V. West's Crypt of the Worm Idol, The Secret of Skyhorn Lighthouse, The Flayed King, and most recently a map of Dyson's for a small island fort that I've repurposed and stocked myself. I've expanded on and re-stocked some stuff, but I've mostly adapted published materials, much of it free.

I had been excited by the idea of running a pretty straightforward dungeoncrawling game with this concept for a while, and pandemic lockdown gave me the impetus. I found the idea of converting my more open-world, greater improvisation existing 5E game to Roll20 or another VTT too intimidating a prospect at first, but this project represented a better way to learn Roll20 using a more limited scope of game. Upload the dungeon maps, the town and local area maps, find/make some tokens, and boom.

I mostly stocked my dungeons with tokens and so forth a level or two ahead of the PCs. I did a bunch of prep up front, and then most weeks needed minimal additional prep. Some needed a bunch, as the PCs found a lead on a new dungeon or something, but often I'd have everything all set up for multiple sessions.

I've been running this as an explicitly old-school game, using Five Torches Deep on the player side and mashing it up with B/X on the DM side and for dungeon exploration procedures. Treasure for XP, using the 5TD xp chart but using normal B/X treasure. I gave higher XP for monsters, taking a cue from OD&D and Wandering DMs. I halved the OD&D baseline award of 100xp/HD, and then I make adjustments as I see fit to monsters based on special abilities or vulnerabilities. This has been nice as a consolation when the players run into some trouble but don't make a big score on a session.

I also use Jeff Rients' Carousing rules. PCs can go carouse like Fafhrd and the Mouser once between delves; spend d6x100 SP (I'm using a silver standard, so this is the equivalent of GP in B/X), gain that much XP. Then take a DC11 Con or Cha check (Jeff Rients uses Save vs. Poison) or I roll on a random table for some trouble or complication, or sometimes something lucky to happen. Jeff also suggests allowing the PCs to gamble more in bigger towns, but as I've been keeping the action local, I let them gamble bigger as they gain in levels, representing knowing more people, having better connections, etc. At 3rd level they can choose to roll a d8 instead, at 5th they can carouse with a d10 if they want.

Using this system the PCs have generally taken an average of around 4 sessions per level. Sometimes a bit less if they get a lucky score or are a new 1st level PC joining up with higher level friends who are delving richer areas than they'd want to risk with just a crew of fellow 1st levelers. I think the pace of 3-4 sessions per level has been pretty great, with I think the highest PC having just hit 7th despite having been energy drained at one point. 5TD only goes to 9th level, so the game has a limited lifespan at this pace, but it's felt good both for me and the players.

I've been very pleased with Dyson's Delve as a tentpole dungeon, being large enough for fun exploration (having a couple of sub-levels and alternate routes to lower levels), but small enough that the players can make meaningful progress on it and even explore a whole level in a single session if they're moving fast.

Thanks for the detailed response.

I ran a test session of 5 torches deep and it did not really grab me, but that might have been due to trying to learn the system at the same time as wrangling an random, eclectic player group. I'll give it another look.