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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chef" data-source="post: 1982421" data-attributes="member: 28067">Hello everybody. I started DMing a new campaign using the World's Largest Dungeon and I thought I'd share what I did with it so far. I was reading this thread before starting the campaign so I used some ideas I got from here. Before the first session, I told everyone to make a character using a 32-point buy. I told them to pick skills appropriate for a long journey underground and that equipment would be handled during the first session.  When the game started, I told the 6 players that they had been accused of various crimes (some falsely) and had been sentenced to be thrown "into the hole" without any equipment.  That worked out to be fun. I have been pretty liberal with letting them improvise clubs and things so they could survive the early encounters. The players didn't fight the orcs in the first room right away but ended up finding them dead later on. It was amusing to see the players get quite excited when they acquired an ordinarily mundane item such as studded leather armor. Before the first session, I went through region A and printed out each piece of equipment on business cards. I have the name, weight, description and stats for armor/weapons on the cards. So whenever they find an item, I just toss the appropriate card down on the table and say "you find this under the rubble" or whatever. The cards for equipment idea works out pretty well, the players don't have to write things down on their character sheets and can easily give items to each other by trading the cards. I also keep a bunch of blank cards beside me for when the players pick things up that I didn't expect. I have pretty much running the encounters as written in the WLD. I planted an extra everburning torch near the beginning so the characters without darkvision don't totally get screwed over since they don't have equipment. I'll probably just let them find a set of thieves' tools soon for the rogue.  I'm using the XP=EL system. There was only one session so far so the players have explored some of region A and made it to level 2. No fatalities so far. The hardest fight they had so far was against the ogre which I scaled down to compensate for the lack of equipment. We are having the next session on the weekend.  Some players won't be able to make the next meet. I don't like it when players who aren't there have their characters die so I'm planning to have a lantern archon appear at the start of the next meet and explain the disappearance of certain characters as space-time distortions in the area. They don't have access to the identify spell so I'm planning to make it easy to figure out which items are magical and how they work. For stuff like sword+1, I'll just have the stats written on the card and see if they notice when I hand the card to them. I won't say what a potion will do but there may be clues in the appearance. For wands, I plan tell them which classes can use it and then they can experiment with it to see what it does. For other miscellaneous items, I'll either give a clue to what it does or just tell them the get a feeling about it when they pick it up and give them the card with the abilities described on it. As stolen from someone else here, I'm also toying with giving the lantern archons limited abilities to summon items into the dungeon for the chosen ones. The players need to have the appropriate craft skill or feat and must sacrifice 3x the listed price of the item worth of goods or coins. Functional items like longswords can’t be used as a sacrifice but a 50gp gold ring could be (basically anything with a value listed in the WLD book can be used as a sacrifice). So if a player wants the archon to summon a dwarven waraxe, then he needs place at least 90gp worth of stuff before the lantern archon and make a craft(weaponsmithing) check. If he fails the check then one of the sacrificial items might be destroyed and he can try again. If he succeeds then all of the sacrificial items are gone and he gets the weapon. I’m not sure how to rationalize this exactly in the game world but it seemed like a fun idea since it lets the players use crafting skills and gives a use to all the items they find. I let them take 20 on skill checks once per character per session. </blockquote>

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