D&D General Tell Me About Your Dungeon Centric Campaigns

[smetzger]

You didn't indicate if you are planning on a purchased adventure or making one yourself. Big difference
I have run Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil 3 times...
1) It really helps if there is an online community for the big dungeon. Other DMs can answer questions and give advice on certain areas.

2) I am going to go against the grain here... Award XP by Challenge/Encounter. If you want to slow the advancement up a bit, figure out how you are going to do it. After a tough fight my players always cheered when I put up the different CRs and numbers they just defeated.
Now I do use home brewed 'hero points', these I give out for milestone advancement.

3) Also against the grain here... allow level ups ASAP (between sessions). This is a game. D&D has always been focused on leveling up. Don't gate this behind... 'go back to town and train'. IMO that just delays gratification.

4) Allow some choices ... RttToEE is in a big ring and the PCs can go one way or the other. So, if they heard of something particularly powerful in one direction they could turn around and go the other direction.

5) Figure out how to handle individual character deaths. Get the new characters into the game as quickly as possible. Death hurts, but making a new character is fun. I did this by having them part of an religious organization, everyone got a free +1 knowledge religion and it was a class skill (so very minor perks). This way if a character died a new one showed up that was part of the organization.

6) RttToEE had restocking guidelines and also guidelines on when an area would just be abandoned.

7) If they will be selling magic items that have been found... maybe agents of the dungeon dwellers are buying magic items... and are buying them (or stealing them) from the characters when they go back to civilization.

8) Mix up and allow for non combat encounters. Making allies, sneaking past sections etc.

9) Figure out how different sections will respond to an incursion in the territory. How long does it take for re-enforcements to arrive, etc.

 

[aco175]

I ran some joint dungeons for several levels and found that having areas with certain themes were helpful for the players. There was a goblin warren that connected to some old catacombs with undead that the goblins had sealed. There was another connection to some areas with minotaurs designed for 3rd level. The PCs managed to stumble into this area while still 2nd level, but managed to fall back and open an area containing a gelatinous cube to block their retreat. I made sure to flavor the areas with goblin graffiti and minotaur blood prints to alert the players of new areas. They were able to mark the borders between the regions and find a few safe areas to rest.

Leveling took place after clearing out a theme for the most part. They took care of the goblins and advanced. The undead went back and forth a bit and they leveled most of the way through after a big battle with a boss undead controlling part of that area. The minotaur area was 2 levels with some minor area tied to other themes. After several weeks the PCs returned to town to refresh and I had a group of giants move into the minotaur level. This gave the PCs some advantage since they knew the layout for the most part.

Overall it was fine. A lot of combat and interacting with traps and secret areas. I did place some NPC prisoners with the minotaurs to rescue and another NPC adventuring party to meet and provide some trade with and options of securing a safe area to further explore.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

My plan is to run a game wherein humble island villagers on a quest of adulthood stumble upon a cult that is trying to awaken the Great Dragonic Eidelons, immense, island-sized, construct/elemental beings which slumber for millennia, and are soemthing like a cross between Shadow of The Colossus, Breath of The Wild’s Divine Beasts, and ideas I’ve had for years for a dragon that is a dungeon.

the first Eidelon they encounter will be one of the islands in their home island chain, where young folk go once a year to prove their passage into adulthood, lighting a signal fire which also serves to keep the Eidelon sleeping.

 

[Jack Daniel]

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.

War stories, eh? Well, permit me to throw up some maps then.

The first time I ever ran a mega-dungeon, I was still acclimating myself to the old-school play-style. I had been involved in the OSR and running Basic D&D for a number of years already at that point, but I hadn't quite grasped all the nuances or understood how old D&D was really supposed to work yet. I was still reluctant to award XP for treasure, so I gave out XP for number of dungeon rooms explored—which did indeed incentivize the players to explore the dungeon, but it didn't incentivize any particular behavior beyond exploration. So even though the PCs continually returned to the dungeon, their motive for doing so remained unfocused and kind of unsatisfying.

The dungeon itself (in its current incarnation—I'm presently running it for the third time over on rpg.net, and here's hoping that my online players don't stumble across this thread!) looks like this:

The central conceit of the dungeon is that it was built by a mad wizard who performed all manner of weird magical experiments (sub-levels 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B are very "funhouse"), but his crowning achievement was the invention of the ethericite crystal, a small fist-sized piece of pure, solidified magic that could be "slotted" into specially-made weapons, armors, rods, wands, etc. to give these items different and changeable magical properties. (Yes, it was a straight-up magicite/materia knockoff.) Moreover, certain whole dungeon levels were locked off by big magical doors with n number of ethericite slots in them, and so you needed to have collected so many of these crystals to access those levels (unless you found one of the secret ways into those levels).

Down on level 5 (in the original version of the dungeon) was a teleporter to Barsoom, because I was on something of a John Carter kick at the time; and I ran this dungeon for my younger brother and his college-buddies literally the summer before the John Carter movie came out. Which resulted in some interesting conversations several months later, when they went and saw that movie after having played in my campaign…

• • •

My second mega-dungeon campaign (which I've also run three times for different groups, although none of them have ever delved any deeper than level 5) was probably more successful. The dungeon itself is called Shade Abbey (if the name rings familiar, remember the first Shining Force game on the Sega Genesis?), and it looks like this:

Shade Abbey is situated on an island called Shade Isle, which serves as a poenal colony for a kingdom across the sea, a place where they dump all of their unwanted criminals and political dissidents and other undesirables. The "prisoners" have built a small shantytown on the southern shore of Shade Isle (it was probably unconsciously inspired by the village of Seyda Neen from Morrowind, but whatever), and the campaign begins when the PCs are dropped off at this town by kingdom ships and left to their own devices.

Shade Abbey is about two days' hike north of the shantytown, and its upper levels are controlled by a seriously naughty word-up sect of priests and monks who are really, really into self-mortification and pain (probably unconsciously inspired by the Yuuzhan Vong from Star Wars, now that I think about it). Moreover, up on sub-level 0B is a massive magical construct called the "Soul Still," which these priests use in despicable fashion—they feed the souls of captured prisoners to the machine and use the distilled essence to create magical weapons and other items, which they then ship back to the kingdom populating the island with prisoners, fueling its militaristic and expansionist aims. This is sort of the first "big reveal" of the campaign.

The second reveal is that if the player characters find and fiddle with the Soul Still, they have a very good chance of blowing it up, and the explosion will probably take all of dungeon level 0 with it. (The upper levels of Shade Abbey are built into the side of a huge plateau or table-mountain called Thunder Table; if the Soul Still gets destroyed, there goes a big chunk of the mesa.) And the sudden and abrupt halt of shipments from the Abbey back to the kingdom will inevitably spark an invasion of Shade Isle by the very kingdom forces who transported the PCs to the poenal colony…

The last major reveal (and again, I've never had a party delve down deep enough to figure this out, because they always get involved with surface-world politics between the kingdom across the sea and other parts of Shade Isle) is that the dungeon itself is alive and hostile, basically a nascent evil god that hasn't reached maturity yet.

The dungeon itself works quite well (and has lots of interconnections between levels for free roaming and exploration), but Shade Isle itself will probably get some major revisions before I ever run this campaign again, because it has some problems with its geography that I've always been too lazy to fix. (Long story.)

Oh, and for this game I did switch to XP-for-treasure, and I'm never switching back. It works. It drives the players to do specific things in the dungeon: look for treasure, take risks, possibly fall for tricks/traps/illusions. It's what D&D was designed for, and it shows!

• • •

Anyhow, these are the two dungeons that I've actually run. I've got a couple more that are only sketched out or half-developed, but the one I'm working on next is called "Mt. Lučzenya," and it's going to be (for all intents and purposes) an "ancient aliens" complex recently discovered by miners dynamiting their way into a mountainside in a vaguely Siberia-esque frontier boomtown, in a setting where all of the fantasy elements are inspired by Slavic mythology. The dungeon itself is designed to be extremely interconnected, including things like water pumps and power stations that make whole new levels accessible or not, depending on how the PCs manage to manipulate the dungeon itself.

Any questions?

 

[Reynard]

Anyhow, these are the two dungeons that I've actually run. I've got a couple more that are only sketched out or half-developed, but the one I'm working on next is called "Mt. Lučzenya," and it's going to be (for all intents and purposes) an "ancient aliens" complex recently discovered by miners dynamiting their way into a mountainside in a vaguely Siberia-esque frontier boomtown, in a setting where all of the fantasy elements are inspired by Slavic mythology. The dungeon itself is designed to be extremely interconnected, including things like water pumps and power stations that make whole new levels accessible or not, depending on how the PCs manage to manipulate the dungeon itself.

Any questions?

Very cool stuff. Thanks for sharing!

I grabbed GURPS Dungeon Fantasy ona whim and am going to run a test of he system sometime soon. If it seems to work, I think I'll use that for my mega-dungeon campaign just to give myself a D&D break.

 

[Mannahnin]

Oh, and for this game I did switch to XP-for-treasure, and I'm never switching back. It works. It drives the players to do specific things in the dungeon: look for treasure, take risks, possibly fall for tricks/traps/illusions. It's what D&D was designed for, and it shows!

Not to disregard all the other cool stuff, in your post, but but I want to chime in to concur on xp for treasure.

I like how it creates a quasi-objective measure of success for characters to pursue in game, and for players to motivate with.

It serves as an intermittent reward/reinforcement structure. Instead of a fixed/predictable pace of xp progression, they tend to have some sessions where they make little or nothing and get a bit frustrated and hungry, and others where they make a big score and celebrate.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I once ran a megadungeon that was a group of dwarves (an all-dwarf game) trying to reconquer a lost mine. This was very Tolkien inspired.

I used Donjon to randomly generate the dungeon. This resulted in way too many locked doors and not enough goblins. It also left the whole thing disjointed - each encounter only made sense on it's own, nothing had any context, making the stakes rather bland.

The all-dwarf party helped bring some coherence to the game, and caused some interesting variations in character types (the rogue and the sorcerer, specifically).

I was using xp as written. This worked fine for me - there were generally enough encounters for the pc's to use their new stuff before the next level.

The game did fall apart after a few sessions, though, for several reasons but I think the random dungeon level was a big one. It was more tedious than exciting.

 

[fearsomepirate]

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.

What I ran:
I all-but-finished Temple of Elemental Evil before COVID hit. Like, we were quite literally about to play the last session before everything got locked down.

The system I used:
I ran D&D 5e modified to play & pace somewhat like AD&D. That means the following:
-Everyone used the AD&D Thief experience table
-Spending gold back at Hommlet to train gained you experience
-Non-combat is run in 10-minute intervals, with a wandering monster check every 2 intervals.
-Rogues don't get to retry lockpicks or whatever over and over.
-Investigation to search for traps on locks & other devices, Perception otherwise.
-STR-based open door checks, surprise check upon successfully slamming open a door.
-Reaction rolls for monsters
-Temple is otherwise run as-is. No attempt to "balance" anything, LEARN NOT TO DIE.

I have a doc written up somewhere for the full rules mod.

What worked:
-Reaction rolls completely changed the tenor of things. If monsters just default to drawing weapons when they see humans, dungeons get pretty boring. When you roll reactions, you have to think about what the monsters are doing. F'rex, on a favorable reaction roll, I might have a group of bugbears playing a game of knucklebones and invite the party to join, see how things work from there.

-Gold for XP and a steeper curve meant players finally stopped focusing on the skinner box of killing things to level up and focused more on engaging with the actual adventure. Everyone was around level 7 or 8 when we almost-finished.

-Treating the dungeon as a constantly evolving thing with rational denizens. There was no "plot." That means the folks who live in the creepy underground tunnels don't follow any set beat. If you kill everybody guarding a high cleric's room and go home before taking him out, he doesn't just wait there for a week for you to come back and kill him.

-Once you get into the swing of filling in personality and details for the monsters, it gets really fun.

-When the wandering monster table comes up with Zuggtmoy (yes, they let her out), she runs a game show and does something horrible to the loser.

What made it tedious:
-Letting the players get trapped in a combat slog. This happened a couple times, but I mostly avoided it. In TOEE, the elemental nodes are basically unfinished, so when you fill them in, you have to make them interesting.

My prep:
I basically did not prep in the traditional sense, because the few times I did, the party took a left turn and ignored whatever I had written. The only time I did was when Falrinth escaped. I prepared a minidungeon for them to go find him. Sadly, the party did not press the advantage when they had it, allowing Falrinth to escape again! What I did was come loaded with charts and books and a pretty solid knowledge of what was in them so I could respond in an agile way to whatever hilarious nonsense the players concocted. When you have a dungeon with hundreds of rooms, being responsive is more important than having crafted backstories and dialogue ahead of time IMO.

 

[Reynard]

What I ran:
I all-but-finished Temple of Elemental Evil before COVID hit. Like, we were quite literally about to play the last session before everything got locked down.

The system I used:
I ran D&D 5e modified to play & pace somewhat like AD&D. That means the following:
-Everyone used the AD&D Thief experience table
-Spending gold back at Hommlet to train gained you experience
-Non-combat is run in 10-minute intervals, with a wandering monster check every 2 intervals.
-Rogues don't get to retry lockpicks or whatever over and over.
-Investigation to search for traps on locks & other devices, Perception otherwise.
-STR-based open door checks, surprise check upon successfully slamming open a door.
-Reaction rolls for monsters
-Temple is otherwise run as-is. No attempt to "balance" anything, LEARN NOT TO DIE.

I have a doc written up somewhere for the full rules mod.

What worked:
-Reaction rolls completely changed the tenor of things. If monsters just default to drawing weapons when they see humans, dungeons get pretty boring. When you roll reactions, you have to think about what the monsters are doing. F'rex, on a favorable reaction roll, I might have a group of bugbears playing a game of knucklebones and invite the party to join, see how things work from there.

-Gold for XP and a steeper curve meant players finally stopped focusing on the skinner box of killing things to level up and focused more on engaging with the actual adventure. Everyone was around level 7 or 8 when we almost-finished.

-Treating the dungeon as a constantly evolving thing with rational denizens. There was no "plot." That means the folks who live in the creepy underground tunnels don't follow any set beat. If you kill everybody guarding a high cleric's room and go home before taking him out, he doesn't just wait there for a week for you to come back and kill him.

-Once you get into the swing of filling in personality and details for the monsters, it gets really fun.

-When the wandering monster table comes up with Zuggtmoy (yes, they let her out), she runs a game show and does something horrible to the loser.

What made it tedious:
-Letting the players get trapped in a combat slog. This happened a couple times, but I mostly avoided it. In TOEE, the elemental nodes are basically unfinished, so when you fill them in, you have to make them interesting.

My prep:
I basically did not prep in the traditional sense, because the few times I did, the party took a left turn and ignored whatever I had written. The only time I did was when Falrinth escaped. I prepared a minidungeon for them to go find him. Sadly, the party did not press the advantage when they had it, allowing Falrinth to escape again! What I did was come loaded with charts and books and a pretty solid knowledge of what was in them so I could respond in an agile way to whatever hilarious nonsense the players concocted. When you have a dungeon with hundreds of rooms, being responsive is more important than having crafted backstories and dialogue ahead of time IMO.

Thanks for the detailed response.

One question I have: did the PCs have to spend whatever treasure they converted to XP on training? If not, what use to you come up with for the masses of gold the PCs would acquire? 5E is notorious for there being few places to use treasure.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Thanks for the detailed response.

One question I have: did the PCs have to spend whatever treasure they converted to XP on training? If not, what use to you come up with for the masses of gold the PCs would acquire? 5E is notorious for there being few places to use treasure.

Yes. The hand-wave explanation I gave is that the gold spent covers your training costs. Becoming an 8th-level fighter requires eating a lot of caviar and crashing a few Ferraris, I guess.