John R Davis
Hero
Castle Amber OAR is one massive site with loads of things to find/talk/fight
-
The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
D&D General What is the best dungeon for long term exploration?
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
Enrico Poli1
Adventurer
Eyes of the Stone Thief for 13th Age
Tell me more about 13th Age and dungeons. I had bounced off it early on for whatever reason and never looked into it again.
Daemini
Explorer
Scarlet Citadel for 5E.
Scarlet Citadel for 5th Edition - Kobold Press Store
Scarlet Citadel for 5th Edition - Kobold Press Store
jgsugden
Legend
Rappan Athuk is my suggestion for a campaign. A number of the suggestions here, while good adventures, are not entire campaigns meant to span the levels.
IMHO, the best Megadungeon Dungeon Crawl has the following layout:
Levels 1 to 4: PCs go on a typical adventure in which they gather lore and background that will set up the megadungeon. I use my version of Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury with some extra lore drops and tweaks added.
Levels 5 to 10: PCs enter the megadungeon. My best megadungeon is not actually that big overall, but it pulls on a trope from video games: Specially, you have to go to twisted versions of it. To navigate it and reach the goals of the dungeon, you need to move between the Prime Material Plane, Shadowfell (which includes a small Ravenloft Domain), Feywild and Ethereal Plane. This gives it a fourth dimensional feel, as I call it.
Levels 11 to 17: The PCs travel to a new megadungeon with Planar influences that has some strong historical significance. For PCs of this level, there should be a feeling that they're involved in something major, so there should be a real significance to the place they enter. It should not feel like a tourist trap (Dunegon of the Mad Mage - I'm looking at you) - it should feel like a place with real weight.
My megadungeon described above has to be navigated in order to reach the Prison of the Gods, which PCs should reach around level 11. This is a place where the Gods imprison Archfiends, Demon Lords, Cthulian Horrors, and Demigods. In my adventure, the PCs are trying to get there because someone is trying to break a Demon Lord out of prison. When they arrive, they discover that the breakout already took place, and the Prioners are running the prison now, but outside the one Demon Lord that escaped, the rest of the prisoners can't leave the facility, yet, although they have free run of it and have twisted it to their needs. The PCs, as well, begin trapped athough they can acquire ways to leave and return - but not until after they have an incentive to return the prisoners to their cells.
Levels 17 to 20: The PCs have to deal with the plots and machinations of the escaped threat, in my case a Demon Lord and his servants before we does the thing that would be - as we say - really bad. In my case, this requires the PCs to either kill the Demon Lord, in Hell, which is hard, or retrap it back in the prison, which by then they should understand how to do, but they have to figure out how to get the right tools and aid to do it.
Last edited:
I own this one and it is near the top of the list, but I wanted to explore other options.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
This list is very good. Each has its own virtues and limitations, and which you want kind of depends on what your exact needs and preferences are. I also recommend having other adventure sites nearby for PCs to explore when they want a break from the mega/campaign tentpole dungeon.
Stonehell has all the virtues cfmcdonald listed above. It's also a bit bare-bones, in a sense? Some folks WANT more description. The early levels are also a bit treasure poor. When I played in an open-table version online the DM literally multiplied the treasure values by 10 to ensure steady progression. I don't think you need to go that far, but the treasure probably should be increased some, assuming you're playing gold for xp. The megadungeon also has a second volume doubling the depth.
Barrowmaze is great. Its layout isn't quite the norm- rather than many levels it has dozens and dozens of barrows with entrances from the surface that sometimes are as small as a single room and stairwell and can be handled in a few minutes, or sometimes are a mini-dungeon of their own, only some of which connect into the actual Barrowmaze beneath them. The Barrowmaze itself is (or appears to be) a single vast level, which gets more dangerous as you move in one direction. The book includes a nearby town and local area. The key is more detailed than Stonehell, but not excessively so. The dungeon does have a theme of lots of undead, while also penalizing Turning them. They're not the only antagonists, but you may want to have other adventure sites available if players want a break from undead. Barrowmaze also tends to be a bit treasure-light. When I've played it the DM has normally included carousing and made an NPC mage in town offer cash for the many minor magic items found in the dungeon, so the players have the option of keeping magic items or converting them to gold & xp. I recommend doing the same, again assuming you're doing xp for gold.
Castle Xyntillan is basically a conceptual update to/improvement on the classic Judges' Guild Tegel Manor. A giant crazy mansion with upper floors and sub-levels, many crazy, dangerous, or even friendly(!) members of the noble family who inhabits it wandering around, who can be negotiated with or give the players tasks. There is a mix of logic and funhouse, with tons of creative areas and encounters. Also a good base town and mechanics for stuff like carousing and recruiting hirelings. Beautiful maps, lots of secrets to discover. Keying is again more detailed than Stonehell, but still designed to be quick to parse at the table.
Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia are classic 1970s designs by Jennell Jacquays. Famously creative in layout, both are large enough for extended play while perhaps not really qualifying as "megadungeons" in the classic sense. Having been published in the 70s, both do have some issues with lack of clarity in the maps in spots- figuring out where certain level connections link up can take some work, though usually you can ask around online for help. Dark Tower is in the middle of a Kickstarter for a Goodman Games OAR right NOW, and hopefully the OAR version will increase playability a little while keeping all the classic creative goodness intact. I have not played Dark Tower but I have played in and read some of Caverns of Thracia, and it's one of my favorite designs ever. Keying can be a little dense in spots; modern tricks of layout to increase readability were not in practice yet, of course.
The Lost City is an 80s classic; Tom Moldvay worked wonders in a 32 page module, but naturally that amount of space does result in a bit of a bare-bones treatment and the DM needing to do some work to flesh the dungeon and the factions (which are present) out a bit. Some of the dungeon design also is a little bit nonsensical, working fine as a dangerous challenge for the PCs but not making a lot of sense in terms of how the NPCs would navigate back and forth between the dungeon/pyramid and the titular Lost City beneath. Some folks have done good work on it online and you can find an extensive PDF suggesting tweaks. Goodman also did a great OAR on this one, which fleshes out the city and adds new adventuring areas.
Rappun Athuk is enormous. I don't have firsthand experience of it, but have read some reports. The maps are extensive and the levels (and sub-levels) many. It has sections which are literal labyrinths designed to be frustrating, including magical effects to confuse mappers which will generally not be well-received by modern players. I recommend abstracting those to figure out a rough estimate on how long it would take to navigate the maze (with some randomization based on character intelligence, perhaps?) and rolling an appropriate number of random encounter rolls, but not making the players actually try to map out and navigate those mazes.
Last edited:
Lord Shark
Adventurer
I mentioned that the Stone Thief is a living dungeon, as in it's actually alive. It travels around beneath the surface, occasionally popping up to eat buildings and towns for more material to extend itself. Which, of course, should include places that are important to the PCs, to motivate them to hunt it. That's also why multiple visits are a must; as the PCs delve deeper into the Stone Thief, they'll eventually disturb it to the point where it folds up and dives to get away, at which point the PCs will have to run like hell for the nearest exit if they don't want to get dragged down with it.
As for 13th Age, it's my favorite D&Dish game these days. It's a game that draws on 4E's developments without being heavy as 4E or PF2, or reactionary as 5E. From the DM's side of the table, I appreciate that it's really easy to create monsters with interesting abilities (rather than bags of HP) and scale them up and down in level quickly to set a desired level of challenge. There's a free online SRD as well.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Must control fanboy inclinations.
You see, I love 5e. But 13th Age is my favorite D&D-like RPG. It's a d20 that came out less than a year before 5e, done by one of the lead designers of D&D 3.0 (Jonathan Tweet) and the lead designer of 4e (Rob Heinsoo) as "the game we want to play in our Wednesday night game". The describe it as "a love letter to D&D", and despite the pedigree it shares a lot of the same streamlining 5e does.
It revamps some of the underlying mechanisms about other pillars of play. First the skill system is replaced by backgrounds. Backgrounds are freeform and designed to be descriptive and broad. So you not "Sailor +4", you're "First mate on the Pirate Galley Roll-yer-Bones". Will that come in while sailing? Sure. But also dealing with dockworkers, finding some shady smuggling connections, and in drinking contests. There's an example I think Rob Heinsoo gave about a convention game where someone had been a military officer on the Sea Wall (attacked regularly by giant kaiju). They were trying to console a woman who they just told their son had died in a military action else. When asked for a roll, the officer was "do you know how many letters I've had to write to the families of our young soldiers?" Boom - background appropriate, use it.
PCs all also have One Unique Thing. It's something, well, unique about them that doesn't provide straight abilities or pluses. It could be a mechanical heart made by the dwarves, or beign the only halfling knight in the kingdom, or being the Emperor's 13th bastard child, or the only acrobat to ever escape from the Diabolist's Circus of Hell. Did the Circus of Hell exist 30 seconds ago? Nope. But now it's canon.
Another point is that PCs have connections - good, bad, or "it's complicated" to the various movers and shakers of the realm. These are called the Icons, and they are big figures, some full of shades of great and some seeming more stark. The last campaign I ran of it the Elf Queen ended up to be one of the biggest bads of the campaign, manipulating other Icons in a subtle, decade long bid to wipe humanity off the map.
Getting back to revamping pillars of play, wizards can cast any spell as a ritual, and basically free-form reshape it with the DM to fit whatever non-combat need wanted. Want to dazzle a settlement with an amazing fireworks display that will shock and awe them? Sounds like 1d4 minutes casting fireball. Need to superheat the forge so it can smelt the ultra-rare metal and make your magic item? What, you want to use fireball for that? Okay, but it will take 1d4 hours.
Because spells can be turned to whatever non-combat uses you can imagine, they only really need to detail them otherwise for combat, a place where we want hard numbers. Casters have a limited number of slots, but they go up in level and every single spell can be upcast. So a mid level caster might have 3rd-5th level slots and no more 1st level.
Spells are also either at-will, per-encounter, or per-day, with some variations available. Your high level caster going into a war and needs to be able to be a devistating caster all day? Take the at-will Magic Missile in a 9th level slot. Boom. Literally.
Between OUTs (One Unique Thing), Backgrounds, Rituals, you should be getting the impression that the system welcomes putting some narrative control in player hands. This is true.
It also supports DM hacking - there's copious sidebars with direct info from the designers - why they did a certain rule that way, the effects of tweaking other rules. Heck, where they disagreed and what each of them proposed as well as why they went with what they did. The curtain is definitely pulled back and makes it a system you can tinker with easily.
Oh gosh, I could go on for pages about the changes and why I like it. Incremental advances (not waiting for a level to get goodies), the Escalation Die (makes combats more tactical in when you o things as well as less grind-y), and a bunch of others.
But before I end, I do need to go one one last bit. The monsters in the core book are very D&D reminiscent. But they didn't hold themselves to that limitation for the two Bestiaries. They are perhaps the very best monster books for any RPG I have ever read. Full of hooks, encounter building, practical advice - these books know that they are to be used to make adventures and live up to that promise. They drip with flavor and awesome, have hooks and connections galore, and give practical advice about running them.
Oh, and one non-system thing - the publisher Peregrine Press runs Bits and Mortar. Basically, regardless if you buy a hardcover from them or from your FLGS, they will give you the PDF for free.
