For the Dungeon Campaign: Are your towns safe?

I've seen some campaign discussions through the years where the referee has declared that towns are safe zones for their dungeon or wilderness campaign, and adventure only happens "out there" - perhaps outside of town, across the river, or in the dungeon itself.   Can anyone who's run this kind of game discuss how the experience went?

It seems like encounters in towns and cities can provide relief and contrast with the tactical world of the dungeon, so I'm wondering, even for a megadungeon campaign, whether I'd actually want to declare towns and cities 'safe zones' or not, and limit a facet of the game.  On the other hand, I can see benefits in making towns purely transactional places that quickly get the focus back to a specific locale.

I'd love to hear perspectives from folks that have gone with the 'town is safe' approach, or some guidance toward blog posts or other writings where the discussion has been expressed already.  Thanks much!

Design Principles for a 5E Megadungeon

We're on the eve of kicking off my first foray into a 5E megadungeon and campaign, assuming weather complies and the players can make it over tomorrow with more snow in the forecast.  For this one, I've gone in a much different direction than the ways I've designed and built megadungeons in the past.

The Old Way
A fair amount of time in the OSR was spent looking backwards to the 70's and trying to recreate how Gary did it with famous campaigns like the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk.  The campaigns seemed gloriously fun and the return to the megadungeon sandbox style was a refreshing escape from scripted stories and DM as author.  I'm immensely grateful for all the tips, tricks, techniques as a member of the OSR movement.

However, the context for modern gaming is changing.  I'm finding that my adult gamers can't make every game session; we can't game 8 hours at a time; players want faster gratification and aren't interested in the skill-testing inherent in gigantic dungeon crawls.  Creating a sprawling dungeon level of 100+ rooms for each level of the megadungeon was fine from both sides of the table in the days before we had kids; I'm seeing that my approach needs to adapt to the realities of busy families and modern people with shifting schedules.  Plus, the table top is competing for mindspace with consoles, tablet games, online stuff, all sorts of competing media.  The RPG model needs to assume episodic attendance and shorter sessions - at least for me, and maybe you too.

Solutions
I tend not to give WOTC a lot of credit, but the idea of the "dungeon delve" as it was positioned in 4E (and maybe even late in 3.x) caught my attention while I've been pondering solutions.  Dungeon delves were short, self-contained scenarios consisting of a series of rooms and a few encounters, perfect for a single night and a pick up game.  They line up well with the modern context - intermittent attendance, pick up games, shorter sessions, faster character advancement.

How would I go about re-envisioning the megadungeon as a sprawling collection of loosely connected delves?

Here's a section of a top down view of Taenarum, complimenting the cross-section I posted a while ago. I'm not happy with this map, there's a long way to go, but it gives you the idea on what I'm thinking:

The overall structure of Taenarum is a large passage winding into the depths of the earth, the legendary road to the Underworld, crossing vast caverns and spaces.  I figure each hex is probably a quarter of a mile, so some of the caverns will be miles across - large enough to hold lakes, islands, even underground cities.  Along the way are countless rooms, nooks, side passages, tertiary halls, and entrances to mini dungeons.  Here's an example of what I mean by a mini dungeon:

One other change I'm doing is trying to do everything electronically, right from the start.  No graph paper maps or hex paper, everything is in notepad or graphic files.  You never know if you'll want to collect it in a book for readers or vanity publishing.  Maybe my players will want to 'Return to the Black City' and I'll have the chance to recreate some older stuff this way.  How cool would that be?

Open Questions
I have a bunch of questions on how 5E is going to work for this kind of dungeon, which I only expect to answer through experience.  How well do the CR systems and encounter guidelines correlate to in-game challenges?  How will the short rest and long rest mechanics work, from a resource management perspective, when the game is built around episodic delves?  Heh, I have a list of observations on 5E, I'll just collate them into a 5E rules post.

Post Script
One funny thing I realized - it didn't require adoption of 5E for me to make some of these changes to the megadungeon approach!  I could have stayed with my favorite rules sets, like LOTFP or ACKS, and run smaller delvers, faster advancement by modifying the XP system, etc, and just run classic OSR rules with alterations to fit the modern gaming context.  My purist tendencies and adherence to tradition tended to get in the way, but I'm getting over it.  I'm looking forward to 5E, though, and the players like all the gadgets and powerful characters - the new races, classes, all that stuff.  I'm sure they'll show up tomorrow with tons of interesting characters.

Taenarum 2.0

Here's a technique I try whenever I find myself blocked or unable to solve a problem - just imagine how the person that's not you would approach the situation.  For instance, I've been considering how an old school megadungeon might look for 5e D&D.  So I approached the question another way -  how would a trendy designer working for one of the popular 3.x boutiques tackle a 5E megadungeon?

Introducing - Taenarum 2.0.

Taenarum 1.0 was an old school megadungeon I started working on last spring, for the kiddos and neighborhood players.  Taenarum is the legendary entrance to the Greek Underworld.  Hades, the god of wealth and the underworld, covets the souls of mortal heroes, and his undead minions created a sprawling maze that promised fantastic treasures and ready death.  We played Taenarum up until about Gencon, at which point the purchase of Icons (a superhero RPG) and a recent obsession with manga inspired me to run American Ninja Cowboys, our current super hero campaign.  Taenarum had a lot of good ideas, though, and the players never got too deep into the dungeon.

We’re still running Icons, although it's not going to be a long term campaign.  I'm behind on some game reports, in fact.  I can see a time within a few months when giant-sized Kaiju will stomp across post-apocalyptic America in the campaign finale.  When Icons wraps up, I'll have a 5E game ready to go.

Making peace with 5E from a campaign perspective came down to three tenets I'm going to try on for size - 'go small to go big', 'love the five-room dungeon', and 'needs more drow'.

In Order to Go Small, You Must First Go Big
A modern design isn't going to have pages and pages of graph paper, with rooms and passages filling every square of blank paper like those 1970's dungeons.  The modern megadungeon needs to big - so big you can't even graph it.  We're not dealing with squares any more - we're hexing it with the hex paper.  The road to the underworld in Taenarum 2.0 is going to be depicted as a meandering downward path on a hex map, leading to various spacious caverns and vaulted chambers the size of small wilderness areas, like the old Descent into the Depths of the Earth.  The new Taenarum has been biggered and bettered.

How I Will Learn To Love the 5-Room Dungeon
One of my other concerns has been the rate of advancement, and keeping the game moving along quickly without overbuilding the upper works with lots of rooms.  Taenarum 2.0 is going to have lots and lots of lairs - smallish dungeons without too many rooms, very modular and easy to plug in as necessary.  The 3.x crowd has been enamored with "five room dungeons" as a design concept, and that structure would work fine for lair creation and small dungeons.  I haven't been a fan of the five-room dungeon in the past, but I'll work on getting over it.

These two tenets together - a giant sprawling hex map, and lots of lairs and mini dungeons, seems like an interesting way to present a modern megadungeon.  I'm intrigued.

Need's More Drow (And Planescape Too)
I'm not a big fan of Drizz't.  I liked Erelhei-Cinlu and the 1970's introduction of the Drow - they had a decadent, opulent, sword & sorcery vibe.  Their hidden society was presented as a vice-ridden cesspool populated by pointy-eared Melniboneans.  Drizz't romanticized the villains and now the Drow are everywhere.  I haven't read the 5E adventures yet, but I'd hazard to guess there's a Drow villain in the Phandelver thing, in the Hoard of the Rise of Tiamat path, and probably in every book that Paizo still puts out (now I'm going to have go skim the 5E stuff, just for giggles).  All modern adventures need more Drow.  I'm going to put a whole Drow city in Taenarum.

Planar travel is a lot more accessible to modern characters too.  I  fondly remember Neil Gaiman's "Season of Mists" story arc on The Sandman, where all these extra planar and mythological entities come to the Dreamlands to barter for the key to Hell.  The afterlife is prime real estate!  With that in mind, I'm going to put a bunch of extra planar embassies in the depths of Taenarum, just outside the gates to the Underworld.  Everybody wants a piece of Hades.

In a rare burst of creativity, I quickly sketched a side view of Taenarum 2.0.  Check it out:

The Vaults
There are many set pieces, puzzles, and themes from Taenarum 1.0 that I can reuse for the 5E version as I build the lairs and mini dungeons.  The seven major vaults are each a destination, community, and potential base for  exploring the next leg of the journey.

Food of the Gods
The original Taenarum featured a fountain that mutated the surrounding fauna, leading to a chasm filled with giant bugs and lizards.  Seems like it can be ported almost directly.  Like its 1970's namesake, there was indeed a giant killer chicken, which amused me greatly.

Hagagora
Taenarum 1.0 had an underground market for various dark dwelling races to buy and sell exotic goods, like the troll market.  In Taenarum 2.0, it's the Hagagora.

Faceless Enclave
The Faceless are revenants that escape the underworld by swimming across the River Lethe, losing their memories and identity.  As undead, they can't return to the sunlight of the surface, so they've created their own refuge in the deeps.

Dark City
This is my place holder for the Drow City because, well, 'needs more Drow'.

Giantopolis
One of the themes of Taenarum is the imprisonment of the Titans, and the efforts of Kronos's minions to free or awaken them.  The giants opposed the gods during a primeval war called the Gigantomachy.

Planar Embassies
Once you're this deep into the underdark, it's not even clear you're still on the Prime Material Plane any longer.  I'm picturing a Casa Blanca style settlement on the outskirts of the Underworld with representatives (embassies) from various interplanar factions - a place for intrigue for high level characters.

Shores of Styx
Charon, Cerberus, the whole thing, as the very bottom of the dungeon.

D&D 5E and the Megadungeon

I've been enjoying the 5E rules.  It looks like a good version of the game.  But I keep coming back to how I'd run my style of campaign (preferably involving a large dungeon, nay, dare I say it? - a megadungeon) using the 5E rules.  Here's the problem:  characters level up extremely quickly in the first few 5E games.  You don't need a lot of game content before they're ready to move on to bigger and better things.

To put it in perspective, it's common for an old school megadungeon to have 80-100 rooms per level.  About a third of those rooms will have monsters, and players should be in a position to level up after 10-15 encounters in an old school game - about half of the rooms.  I've run a number of megadungeons the past few years.  It usually takes anywhere from 4-8 game sessions to advance, depending how long you play.  I could go into an explanation how I came by those numbers, but it's not terribly germane here - I want to focus on 5E.

The 5E characters don't spend a lot of time in the early levels - they should level up from level 1 to level 2 after the first game session, and get to level 3 after the second.  From there, the experience curve increases such that it should take 2-3 sessions per additional level.  It's still a fast ascent, about twice as fast as the older editions.  I don't disagree with the approach.  I can see younger gamers appreciating the chance to constantly improve their characters.  For the referee, there's no chance of getting bored with the bestiary - you're constantly throwing new and different monsters at the players.

But let's get back to that problem regarding the content.  You don't want to invest a lot of time creating content for a large dungeon, content that has very little chance of seeing play, because the players are advancing so quickly.  So those are our constraints - fast advancement, and limited prep time.  Constraints breed creativity.  The outside the box approach is to just change the rules.  Nuke the default experience system, and start using gold for experience like an old school game.  Make it work just 1E AD&D.  That's easy, but it's kind of lazy.  Can't we do better?

First, I tend to think of two styles of megadungeon, closed and open.  A closed dungeon is lost or unknown to the world, and the players are the first people to explore it after a very long time.  A closed dungeon is like a ship in a bottle or a fly trapped in amber - if there are living inhabitants in the dungeon, it must be some kind of closed loop balanced ecosystem in there, at least until the players show up and start killing everything in sight.  Designing a closed dungeon to fit the players seems pretty straightforward - just size the levels properly for advancement.

The other style of dungeon is different.  An open dungeon is well known, and visited.  It's assumed areas of the dungeon have been mapped and explored, perhaps cleared out by other adventurers.  There's foot traffic involving rival parties, and monsters from the surrounding areas may come and go.  It's a much more dynamic environment.  I tend to prefer open dungeons, it's fun to think through what it means to the surrounding areas to have a known source of adventure, danger, and dungeon gold just sitting in the nearby wilds.

Here are some options that are going across my brain for a large dungeon that attempt to work within the constraints - fast advancement and limited content.

The upper levels could be small.  Perhaps they are geographically small (meaning the maps don't cover a lot of ground), or the maps are large and relatively empty, and the content coverage is small - like maybe there are only a few areas of the upper levels that are unexplored territory.  A small map works fine for a closed dungeon, the large empty map (with only a few unexplored areas left at the fringes) is fine for an open dungeon - especially if the players can learn about the unexplored areas in advance, through rumors back in town.

What about collapsing levels 1-3 down to a single large level?  5E was supposed to bring 'bounded accuracy' to the table, so the danger curve isn't as steep.  It could satisfy the old school blood lust for a high mortality rate amongst freshly minted characters by mixing in 2nd and 3rd level threats throughout the dungeons upper works.  Dungeon level 1 would cover character levels 1-3, dungeon level 2 would correspond to character levels 4 (and possibly more), and then each new level would have a corresponding offset (dungeon level 3 is for 5th level characters, and so forth).  Hmmm, that idea seems pretty good as well.

A related idea might be to skip directly to the level 3 action.  The characters would still have the chance to advance from level 1 to level 3, but all of that happens outside of the dungeon as the players get introduced to the setting.  They get some experience fighting bandits, help an old lady across the street, find and return Farmer Maggot's lost pig, the meat and drink of high adventure.  PC's wouldn't actually be ready to take on the dungeon until they're at least 3rd level, and then we follow a similar offset as above (dungeon level 1 is for level 3 characters, dungeon level 2 is for 4th level characters, and so on).

5E uses a lot of shortcuts from the older games - simplified stat blocks, for instance.  It seems like it could be amenable to a barebones treatment - big maps, sparse notes, lots of random content.  Maybe the 5E megadungeon can be as barebones as an old school dungeon; the referee just needs to be okay if a large part of the maps don't get used.  I'm hesitant about this approach because 5E seems to invite more set pieces and detailed encounter areas as opposed to improvisation - although it's not nearly as dependent on encounter design as 4E.  I supposed there's an implied constraint - we don't want to create too much content up front, but we want it to be deep or rich.

There really wasn't a 4E megadungeon to look back on as a reference, from what I can recall.  Because there was tight integration between the challenges and the player's capabilities, the focus in 4E was on smaller encounters and lairs that each culminated in a set-piece boss fight.  The nearest analogues to the megadungeon in the 4E world was Thunderspire Labyrinth or Chaos Scar.  Thunderspire Labyrinth was a mid-level adventure in a giant abandoned maze - it used a sprawling hex-crawl sized map.  In theory, the place was full of side passages and chambers that were unmapped, but the game product only covered a handful of lairs within the larger labyrinth.  The players typically got directions and guidance on how to find the lair as part of the plot hook or mission briefing, and it was assumed they stuck to the directions.  If you want to go big - like Mines of Moria big - then Thunderspire Labyrinth is a model that could work for 5E, too.  I shook the dust of 4E off my boots  a long time ago, but that was my favorite product from that period.

The 4E Chaos Scar was interesting because it created a game context for deeper = more dangerous, and I love those types of ideas as frameworks.  The Chaos Scar was a lair-filled valley, carved in the past by a falling meteorite.  Somewhere deep in the valley, the chaos meteor was still present, lurking.  The deeper the players penetrated into the valley, the more dangerous were the lairs nestled in the canyon walls.  It basically flipped the dungeon from a vertical construct to a horizontal construct.  Neat concept, but I didn't stay with 4E long enough to see how the final campaign played out.  The lairs were published in WOTC's  monthly online Dungeon magazine.  Does anyone know off hand if they were ever made free \ public?

I'm going to play around with encounter design and experience budgets over the weekend and see how the suggested numbers work.  I like the idea of collapsing the top levels down to a single level (covering levels 1-3) assuming there's a way to make it challenging but not instantly deadly - like having some gradients of encounters across the level.  I like the node-based lair approach of Thunderspire Labyrinth, too.

D&D 5E is… Awesome?

In the aftermath of the holidays, I've been able to peruse the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons.  It's… an interesting game.  In many cases, it's an amalgam of the previous four major editions of D&D (AD&D 1E, 2E, 3.5, and 4th) cherrypicking some of the best or most iconic bits and making sure they're represented.  The mechanics are streamlined and simplified, and there's plenty of modern design thinking evident - things like inspiration points, or minimized book keeping and resource management.  Overall, it seems like a good game from a quick read through of the system.

Characters advance very quickly, have a wide range of abilities (even at level one), and they recover from adventures very quickly.  It supports a far more cinematic and heroic style of play than OSR D&D.  If Tolkien's literary roots correspond to the AD&D 1E experience, than D&D 5E is like the Peter Jackson edition.  There's even a mine-car chase pictured in the artwork.

I really like top-down adventure and dungeon design, and I was gladdened to see lots of material in the DMG to support encounter creation, experience budgets, challenge ratings - that kind of stuff.  4E did that well, although combats were typically long and grindy; 5E kept the math-based design aspects, but the higher damage output by characters and monsters looks like it will avoid the grind.  I need to get some drive-time with the rules in play, perhaps with the starter set or something, to fully calibrate how the encounter experience plays out at the table.  I've only done a few of the pre-release play tests.

I also liked all the options late in the DMG for adding things like madness, horror, honor, injuries, and other optional rules like firearms and gonzo science fantasy.  There are a lot of dials and levers the referee can adjust to alter the tone of their game.

There is some dissonance between what 5E is proposing as the style of play and how I run dungeon crawling with older editions.  For instance, consider the rate of advancement proposed in 5E.  A party of adventurers should advance to level 2 after the first game session, to level 3 after the second game session, and then to level 4 after the next 2-3 games - and that's the expected rate of advancement for the rest of the game, with the players earning a new character level every 2-3 game sessions.  Keeping with the Peter Jackson cinematic experience, characters will go from zero to epic hero in the course of the two hour movie.

This expected rate of advancement dramatically changes how you'd approach designing a sprawling dungeon, like the classic old school megadungeon.  No need for extensive 100-room dungeon levels when the players are going to be ready for the next level down after a scant couple of combat encounters.  Plus, all of the experience in default 5E comes from fighting, not recovering treasure like the older editions.  Figuring out how I'd do a large dungeon in 5E is one of the first things I'm going to consider with the system.  I have a few friends playing "The Rise of the Hoard of Tiamat the Queen Dragon" (sic) adventure path books, and they've remarked that they're fairly linear and feel like a railroad.  Could just be their referee, but I'm suspicious that most of the 5E officially supported materials might come out in that style, to support the way characters rocket through their character levels.  It's not my favorite approach, but some adventure paths are written better than others, no doubt.  WOTC could "get there".

We did a game last summer built around a dungeon called "Taenarum", the legendary road to Hades and the Greek underworld (before gamer attention deficit disorder drew me into the super hero game for a bit) .  5E could work really well for that style of game - powerful characters that quickly advance to a legendary status, myths and monsters, an epic setting.  I'm off work a fair amount in the next week and will start thinking about whether Taenarum 2.0 could be worth investigating.  Maybe 5E would work for Vikings and an updated approach to one of my older campaigns, the Black City.  Dunno.  I know the system is new, has anyone started working on a megadungeon style of play with 5E, or are you finding there's too much resistance built into the system?

Treasure Maps

I've been enjoying using treasure maps in Taenarum.  They come up as random results on the magic items table, and I've placed them manually to add interest to a treasure hoard and relocate treasure to someplace more appropriate.  They serve a useful, self-referential purpose in the dungeon.  They give the players a reason to circle back and discover something previously missed, or offer them a useful clue they need to hold onto until it makes sense - when they can match the map snippet with the treasure  against their larger map.

I'm firmly in the camp that a megadungeon needs lots of empty rooms and fly-over terrain.  The players aren't meant to laboriously explore every corner of every room; they're frequently passing quickly through empty spaces en route to an actual destination or quest.  It creates space for them to find a reason to return to an 'empty' area later when they find a map or clue indicating a hidden cache.

My creation process is straightforward - I determine the room where the treasure is hidden, first (randomly, of course) and drop a quick note in the room description where the treasure is hidden.  Then I'll make a small map, usually showing the treasure room and a nearby room or hallway.  The objective is to give the players a small pattern on a snippet of graph paper - whenever they've mapped enough of the larger dungeon to match the snippet, they now know where to search.

I've placed a few verbal treasure maps as well, little rhymes such as "Black water beneath the cypress tree, third step down to find the orange key".  So far, none of these have shown up in game reports, though at least one is hidden on somewhere on level one.

Eventually, the treasure maps I use will be more elaborate - they'll point to areas outside the dungeon that require quests and wilderness travel.  For lower levels, the self-referential maps are fine.  I don't want to over think them, and don't let them become blockers.  They're completely optional for the players - bonuses for the vigilant.

My Dungeon Has A Dungeon Master

We're still talking about dungeons here at the Lich House - big dungeons.  Dungeons so large they can even be called - dare I say it - "mega"?

When planning the dungeon campaign, one decision the referee should consider regards the infamy of the dungeon and the surrounding area.  Is the dungeon well known?  Have other people tried to explore it before the players?  There is a different set of assumptions required if the dungeon has never been plundered, existing like a closed ecosystem, ship-in-a-bottle or monster zoo awaiting discovery.  I usually go the opposite direction, and assume the dungeon is well known, legendary, and that plenty of other people have been there first.  I assume the player characters are desperados that have flocked from across the civilized lands to the frontier to try test themselves against the big bad dungeon and see if they can do better than those who came before.

Consider the opportunities that arise by taking this approach.  Because the dungeon is legendary, actual legends about the dungeon exist as player knowledge.  There are rumors to hear.  Old timers in town can relay things about the dungeon.  There are probably maps regarding the common entrances that can be purchased.  Large dungeons nearby are good for business, assuming the monsters don't rampage around the countryside.   I usually put a whole economy in the frontier town around servicing adventurers.   The Black City had the nearby Viking camp called Trade Town, and Taenarum isn't far from the fishing village of Psammathous Bay, which despite its isolation, boasts an adventurer's guild hall and a steady influx of freshers arriving by ship from Gythium, the nearest port city.

But if the players aren't the first adventurers to attempt to plunder the dungeon, there are some problems to resolve.  From whence comes the new monsters to replace the fallen?  How is treasure getting restored?  Wouldn't all the traps and tricks already be triggered by previous groups?

I usually try and put a literal "Dungeon Master" into each of my games - a malign figure that's making sure the dungeon stays deadly.  It's an attempt to put a rational explanation behind all the weirdness.  The Dungeon Master usually has his or her own purposes over and above killing player characters, and can even show up from time to time as an encounter.  It's great fun.

In Harrow Home Manor, there is a mysterious cowled figure called The Caretaker - the worm-ridden remains of a Hyperborean wizard - who treads the spider-webbed halls of Harrow Home and makes sure the guards and wards stay intact.  The Black City has the "plasticals", rubbery artificial life forms that looked a bit like grey aliens, usually carrying wrenches or toolboxes.  They serve the large artificial intelligences that run the engineering beneath the alien city.   The AI's themselves manifested 3-dimensional holograms and appeared like 'gods'.  Taenarum is maintained by Lord Skothos and the Eidelons.  Let's meet them.

Eidelons are spirits of the dead empowered by Hades to return to the surface world for specific jobs.  In Taenarum, each level of the dungeon is overseen by a different Eidelon - they have pompous and overblown titles like the Lord of Bones, the Ghoul King, or the Prince of Darkness, and each commands a different type of undead.  The position of Eidelon is competitive.  Each one wants to send the most souls down to the Underworld and get a promotion to the next highest position, displacing a rival.  The lowest Eidelon is the Lord of Bones, the commander of the skeletons.  Whenever adventurers destroy the reigning Lord of Bones, a larva crawls out of the nearest Stygian well within a few weeks and assumes the mantle, becoming the next Lord of Bones.  Ditto if a higher ranking Eidelon is destroyed - everyone else gets an upward promotion, and a new Lord of Bones wriggles out of the Stygian well.

The Eidelons are responsible for setting death traps in their areas and ensuring there are pots of gold to lure adventurers to their doom.  The wealth of the Underworld is legendary and endless, so there is no lack of replacement treasure ferried around the dungeon by other servants of Hades, the furies or the devils.  In addition to various undead, the Eidelons are served by dark dwarves and kobolds.  Kobolds in the setting are small animated manikins with dog-skull heads who set minor traps and supplement the clean up crews.  The dark dwarves revere Hades as Pluto, lord of wealth, and are given free passage throughout the dungeons in return for occasional services rendered.

Major construction and creation of powerful and deadly magical effects is left to Hades' favorite servant, Lord Skothos the lich. Lord Skothos dwells in a palatial sanctuary on dungeon level 10, dreaming of new and more horrible challenges to bedevil adventurers.  He also summons unique and powerful monsters from the Underworld as necessary and places them around the dungeon.  He's like an undead  version of The Joker or Arcade (from Marvel) and Taenarum is his personal Murderworld.  Lord Skothos is Walt Disney's undead evil cousin, a D&D version of the Jigsaw Killer.  He can be encountered anywhere in the dungeon as a wandering monster when conducting inspections, and is glad to speak with any adventurers that can bear his undead presence (although he gets frustrated by low level adventurers that are paralyzed with fear and can't participate in a conversation).  He likes to pick up first-hand feedback from adventurers who have survived nearby traps so he can improve them for the next group - or demote the nearest Eidelon for incompetence.  It's the dungeon version of the customer satisfaction survey.

I wonder if I should take the amusement park analogy all the way for Taenarum.  Perhaps there is an operations center near the palace of Lord Skothos where kobolds and Eidelons monitor different aspects of the dungeon.  "Drat, that stupid player character thief disabled another trap in sector 3.2.  Better dispatch a work crew to fix it before another group heads that way.  Oh - and someone put a large bounty on the head of this 'Black Dougal' character.  I'm tired of that guy disabling our traps.  Let's get him with a poison needle or something."  Escorting monsters to their new lairs, resetting traps, replacing treasures, and hauling away the bodies of dead adventurers - all in a day's work.  It's D&D's answer to Westworld.

Next time you're approached by a solitary cloaked figure while trudging down some forsaken hallway in one of my dungeons, be warned - it could be the Dungeon Master!

Megadungeon Practices

I've been meaning to do this for a while - list out the practices I've incorporated into building my megadungeons.  I've been running megadungeons for the past 3 years and have been building up some useful experiences.  The previous megadungeon was called The Black City - it was all about Vikings exploring the dungeons beneath a ruined, alien city in the frozen north.  The current campaign (Taenarum) involves the road to Hades.  The defiant god of the underworld has populated a massive dungeon with monsters and traps to lure arrogant heroes to their deaths.  I've also had this on again / off again relationship with a project called Harrow Home Manor, but it's on the shelf for a little while why I focus on summer gaming with the neighborhood kids and family - Harrow Home was too horror oriented.  I'm sure I'll get back to the horror soon.  That is not dead which can eternal lie... you know how the lines go.

The concept behind a megadungeon is to have a location expansive enough that most or all of the adventures can happen in and around the dungeon.  During the campaign, there will be side treks in the wilderness and excursions to towns and cities, but the primary action is back in the main dungeon.    The dungeon should have enough material for a party of adventurers to progress through many levels of experience by moving down to more dangerous levels - maybe all the way from levels 1-10 if you're ambitious.  I've incorporated another piece to the definition as well - the megadungeon should be large enough that multiple adventuring parties can be exploring it at the same time.

In no particular order, Beedo's principles for the megadungeon campaign:

Top Down Design
I start with a compelling rationale for the megadungeon - an elevator pitch - and then make sure there's a good variety of themes for levels and sublevels.  This provides an outline for the overall project, a roadmap on where you're going.  Here's a recent example of this approach:  Nodes of Taenarum

Accessibility
I like the megadungeon to have "highways" in and out - a mechanism for fast access that lets experienced parties quickly get down to the unexplored areas without wasting a lot of table time dealing with trivial wandering monsters and travel.  The Black City had 'the transit tunnels', a series of subway tunnels beneath the ruined city.  Taenarum has the wide, spiraling 'road to the Underworld'.

Vertical Transit
Each map should have multiple ways up and down (unless choke points are an explicit part of the design - but like salt, use them sparingly).  I also like chutes, elevators, and portals.  The vertical access points also provide rationales for why monsters of higher and lower levels mix it up.

Use a Stocking Algorithm
I typically use a home-made random stocker modeled after the Moldvay BX version, where 1/3 of the rooms are either empty or contain monsters, and the other 1/3 is either a trap or special.  I've even done some posts on the blog giving some ideas how to build a random stocker in Excel.  Take the time to create useful trap and "special" tables for yourself.

Customize Monster Lists for Areas
Build unique encounter lists to fit the thematic areas of the dungeon.  Include the chance of encountering weaker monsters from the level above, and stronger monsters from the level below.  They travel around!

Deeper Levels = Greater Danger
Make it clear that deeper levels are more dangerous.  The megadungeon is a player-driven sandbox, and this structure lets the players have a degree of choice over the amount of risk they'd like to undertake.  Here's an example of a rationale for why depth = danger:  The Dungeon as Estuary.

Gold as Experience
Making gold the primary vehicle for gaining experience motivates the players to seek lucrative hoards and prioritize treasure over combat.  Roleplaying, trickery, and noncombat solutions are just as relevant as fighting.  The standard for giving out experience is about 80/20 - 80gp for each 20xp of monsters killed - a 4 to 1 ratio.

Progressive Elaboration
Start with a minimal keyed description for each room, and add more details only as necessary when the area becomes relevant for game play.  It lets you create the maximum scope in the least amount of time:  Developing the dungeon through progressive elaboration.

Pacing Advancement
A major advantage of using Gold as XP is that you can calculate how much treasure can be potentially recovered from an area as a lump sum, allowing a top-down approach to allocating experience across each level and sub-level.  This gives the referee rough insight on how quickly the party will be ready to descend to more dangerous areas.

Harmonizing Random Results
I'm a big proponent of not altering dice rolls during game play, but I do advocate adjusting random results during dungeon stocking.  However, the challenge of reconciling inconsistent random results (like antagonistic monsters living nearby) spurs creativity.

Set Piece Locations
One way to ensure large semi-random levels maintain their interest is by including some well-designed set piece encounters on each level - they act as points of interest, destinations, and landmarks.

Factions and NPCs
Too many unintelligent monsters are boring.  Rawr, I'm a monster.  Invest time in creating interesting factions and NPC leaders that have their own goals and motivations for being in the dungeon.  It opens up a political roleplay dimension during dungeon exploration.

Overarching Stories
Don't be afraid to put some story behind the dungeon inhabitants.  "The cultists of Pan are exploring the dungeon to find the lost elemental artifacts and return the world to primordial nature; the followers of Hecate want to open the gates of Tartarus".  Giving the NPC factions motivations and goals allows stories to emerge naturally as the players interact with them.

Rivals
One of my signature elements is to have lots and lots of NPC rivals to the players - other adventurers, explorers, treasure hunters, and so forth - friendly rivals back in town, dangerous opponents when met in the dungeon.  Some of the most memorable moments emerge when the players finally get the better of their long time rivals.

X is for Killing
The megadungeon is a sandbox where the players are free to try anything; if you've put something in front of a group of players all holding sharp pointy things, don't be surprised if they stab it.  There are no DMPC's or Mary Sue NPCs in the sandbox:  X is for Killing

Campaign Events
Have a list of random events that are happening in the world, place some of them on the calendar, and call them out as they happen.  Even though the players are focused on the dungeon, this puts the world in motion and creates a sense of time and verisimilitude.  Example:  Campaign Events for the Black City

Flow of Information
There needs to be a steady flow of information from you to the players so they can plan interesting excursions into the dungeon.  Two easy forms are rumors and quests, discussed just the other day:  Rumors and Quests.  Treasure maps are awesome too.

Plan to Restock
My players don't typically return to areas they cleared previously, but the dungeon should provide a rationale for why monsters return and areas become populated again.  In Taenarum, there are Stygian wells that allow undead and spirits to creep back into the dungeon, and there are powerful servants of Hades that literally reset traps and restock areas with enchanted monsters.

I hope to make this a living list of principles - I'm sure I haven't captured everything in one pass!

Edit - here's the first thing I forgot to include on the first pass:

Support Episodic Play
Place a town nearby the dungeon.  Start and end each game session back in the town (preferably at the tavern, for style points).  This allows players to come and go in between game sessions - important when you're gaming with adults who can't meet every week.

Dungeon Quests and Rumors

I'm formalizing a new technique for my sprawling megadungeon, Taenarum.  Let me know if you've done anything similar, and how it's been working out.

The basic problem is scope.  Taenarum, the entrance to the Underworld, is somewhat large - it is spread out, if not dense.  Each dungeon level spans 4 sheets of graph paper as quadrants.  The quadrants contain anywhere from 25 to 40 rooms, and each has a slightly distinctive theme.  The main road (a vaulted 20' x 20' passage) wends through all 4 quadrants as it spirals down into the earth, eventually leading to the River Styx some 9-10 levels below.  On either side of the main road are the many side passages and lairs that constitute the encounter areas for that level.

I'm pacing the dungeon so that a party should have to explore and loot somewhere between 1.5 and 2 quadrants before feeling ready to head down to the next level.  I certainly don't expect anyone to clear the dungeon.  It's just not that interesting to crawl a massive dungeon room by room.

In the past, I've used rumors and hints in town to give the players more choices about planning their game session.  The idea of calling them "rumors" and "quests" is to put some more structure and discipline into the mechanism from my side of the table.  Rumors are nuggets of information that don't have an expiration date;  quests are windows of opportunity to do something for gain, but if you pass the opportunity by, it's assumed some other adventuring group attempts the quest and the opportunity is now gone.  I just completed mapping and stocking the final quadrant of level 4, so I'm way ahead of the players and campaign - I'll be able to start on the campaign hex maps shortly.  I'm circling back to create rumors and quests for the 16 or so quadrants that are already out there.

Here's why these types of things, the rumors and the quests, are important.  The players need information to make decisions and create plans.  If the players are aimlessly wandering, and know very little about the dungeon, each decision - to go left, or to go right - isn't much better than a coin flip.  The game is much more satisfying for all involved when the players are creating explicit plans to follow their own goals.

The players naturally pick up clues and information just by exploring the dungeon, certainly.  You want them to have a list of open questions and potential goals or targets that carry over from previous sessions, so each game night starts with them planning the night's excursion.  Almost every game session of Taenarum starts back at the adventurer's tavern.  The image of grubby adventurers pouring over maps and notes and arguing over objectives across a wooden table, surrounded by mugs of drink, is fairly well grounded in their actual behavior.

I give the players an opportunity to learn a new rumor each week just by networking at the adventurer's guild hall - they've gone out of their way to make introductions to some of the other groups that visit the place.  Now I'm going to start formally introducing quests - maybe not one per session, I'll see how the pacing goes.  I'm going to attach some kind of monetary award to the quests to make them more enticing - but ultimately, remember that the real rewards are in the dungeon.  Perhaps a few hundred gold pieces (per dungeon level of the quest) is enough?

Since I have two different groups of players exploring Taenarum, introducing rumors and quests gives them additional reasons not to trod the same ground.  I may have mentioned this, but they do share notes and try to visit the same places if there's a chance to get the same boon!

I could eventually add people to act as patrons for the quests, but for now I'll just improvise a villager, adventurer, or visitor to the town as the situation requires.  One of the first things I make for a new campaign are some tools for quick NPC generation - they come in super handy for these types of things.  Perhaps I'll even introduce a message board where quests get posted.

Below are some sample rumors and quests for the four quadrants of level 1.  One of the groups already discovered the source of rumor 1.1 (the shrine of fate) and guided some traders to the market (quest 1.2).

1.1
Rumor:  There's a secret shrine to the Fates that grants boons - a bronze man points the way!
Quest:  Clean the despoiled shrine of the goddess Aphrodite and earn her blessing.

1.2
Rumor:  The Arch of Greed - a great treasure lies beyond it.
Quest:  Find the shortcut to the monster market to help guide some traders.

1.3
Rumor:  There's a chasm that provides quick access to a few of the lower levels.  Bring ropes!
Quest:  Rescue another adventurer from enslavement to the dryads (or the alseids - can use this one multiple times).

1.4
Rumor:  There's a statue hidden in a pit that pours healing potions out of it's mouth!
Quest:  Pig-men of the sorceress kidnapped my daughter, please rescue her.  (In reality the daughter ran off to be an apprentice).

*Image is from The Shady Dragon Inn, a great resource for NPC's and parties for classic D&D.  Sadly, it's not in PDF on dndclassics.com... yet.

Developing the Dungeon through Progressive Elaboration

I'm a general manager these days, but most of my industry experience is in IT project management.  Software projects are notoriously high risk and prone to under-delivering or killing the budget.  Over the past 10 to 15 years, different approaches to structuring  software projects have come into vogue to help guide the creative process.  I always enjoy seeing how I can apply stuff learned on the day job to the night job - campaign creation.  Your campaign development is a work product.

Traditional project approaches use a structure called 'waterfall'.  All the activities of a phase are completed before moving on to the next set of activities.  In software terms, that would be identifying all the requirements for the software first, then creating designs and blueprints, then building it, then testing it, and so on.  The work product from the previous phase is an input flowing into the next phase, usually represented through a step chart (gantt chart), therefore the term 'waterfall'.  In campaign creation, you could imagine creating all the hex maps first, then maps for all the towns and cities, then descriptions of all the towns, and so on - exhausting one activity completely before moving on to the next thing.

Scrum (a type of "agile development") is focused on quickly getting a working iteration of software published, putting it in front of the customer, and moving on to the next iteration while incorporating feedback and customer insights.  If the waterfall approach had you building one large layer at a time, the Scrum approach involves a 'vertical slice of the cake' that has a snapshot of all the layers accounted for in that mini product.  In dungeon terms, imagine creating a few rooms, fully mapped and detailed and keyed and packaged, and then getting some players to experience those limited rooms.  You'd incorporate what you learned in the first game session when you prepared for the next session.  That;s a bit like a Scrum project.  I'd say most just-in-time campaign creation uses that approach.

The approach I've been taking with Taenarum involves "progressive elaboration".  There was a software project management approach championed by IBM in the late 90's called "RUP" - the rational unified process - that used progressive elaboration as a core method.  One of the driving metaphors was developing a walking skeleton, and slowly adding on to the skeleton the way a sculptor would add clay to a metal frame.

In Taenarum, I've started with expansive maps of the dungeon levels, without adding too many details - just the layouts and number of rooms.  I make some notes on the theme of the level, and a list of monsters to plug into the random stocker.  Then I use a random stocker to quickly add raw content to the rooms.  These few things give me that underlying 'metal frame' - the walking skeleton.  Sometime later I do another pass over the level, harmonizing  and rationalizing the random results to make it either coherent or interesting… (and sometimes even both).  Doors, secret doors, and other map objects get added in.  Treasure is added where appropriate - first as gross sums to balance the level, and then it gets decomposed into more interesting forms when time permits.

Here's an example.  After the first pass through the random generator, I'd have an entry like this:  Room 7, monster & treasure:  Traders.  Next it becomes a 'trader camp' with 5 traders and 800gp treasure.  On the third pass through, I decide to give the main guy a name and personality (table driven) and change the raw treasure total into something more interesting.  (Pro tip:  the ACKS book has handy tables for trade goods as replacement treasures for coins - the tables are massively useful, regardless of system).  Here's how the final room ended up looking in my notes:

7.  Trader Camp
---------------------
Pillared chamber used as a camp by a party of traders led by Kyriakos of Gytheio - a handsome man with earrings and the attitude of a practical joker.

5 Traders (level 1 fighters) and 3 slaves (normal men).   Incidental weapons (spears, clubs) and leather armor

Trade goods:
6 bundles of fox pelts (90gp total)
2 casks of distilled wine (400gp total)
3 rugs (15gp total)
8 weeks of food, water (40gp value)
100gp, 1500sp
10 +1 arrows with bronze tips, carefully wrapped

I use a little excel sheet to generate hit points on the fly, and can improvise or derive combat stats as necessary, so I'd usually never put that kind of thing in my notes.

You may wonder - why bother with all those iterative passes over the same material, when I could have jumped right to creating the entry for room 7 on the first pass?  It comes down to balancing scope and detail.  The barebones version of the level, with a map and raw content, lets me improvise as necessary if the players wander farther into the dungeon than are fully prepared.  Any one of us could improvise a room like the Trader Room - the worst case is that it might slow the game down a little if you need to roll a bunch of dice at the table.  By starting with the skeletal framework, I've been able to sit down with a couple of hundred more rooms available than otherwise - Taenarum is over 300 rooms in just a few weeks of development.  The finishing details get added as time permits, or when I know there's a good chance the players will visit a given area in an upcoming session.

Back before I mused about becoming the Anti-Beedo, I was definitely a 'vertical slice of cake' kind of referee, who would have completely finished  Room 7 Trader Camp before moving on to Room 8 - I developed things serially.  Anti-Beedo wants to cover as much ground as possible, and is willing to leave the finer details ambiguous until time permits or it's necessary for clarity.  The approach is working, and I've been happy with Anti-Beedo's results so far.  I have more dungeon material in Taenarum in just a few weeks than I had in the Black City after many many months.

The Vast Wealth of Dungeons

Four Million Reasons to Embrace Campaign Style Play

There are a number of inter-related factors in old school D&D that work together to support the megadungeon as a campaign centerpiece.  Dungeon level equaling monster level and difficulty provides the players the most direct control over danger versus reward during their planning.   XP for Gold means that creative problem solving and ingenuity is more important than combat - avoiding fights and still making it out with the money is the best path to victory.

One thing you're going to have to face in a dungeon-oriented campaign is the phenomenal amount of wealth that adventurers are going to draw out of the dungeon.  The ratio of experience from gold versus monsters is somewhere near 4 or 5 to 1.  A first level party, needing 10,000+ experience points to move everyone up to level 2, is going to need at least 8,000gp from the first dungeon level alone!

I posted a chart in one of the "scoreboard" posts the other day on how much wealth a party will have retrieved from the dungeon in order to gain a certain level.  It becomes astronomical.  A 10-level megadungeon needs to have something like four million cumulative gold pieces to get to level 10.  If the dungeon is large enough to support multiple adventuring parties, you can double or triple that amount.  What's that mean for your campaign?

Party Level / Wealth Gained
1  10,000
2  10,000
3  20,000
4  40,000
5  80,000
6  160,000
7  320,000
8  640,000
9  1,280,000
10 1,280,000

*Sum is 3.8 million gold to get to level 10...

There seem to be a few schools of thought.  One school of thought attempts to perpetuate, for as long as possible, the experience of scraping coppers, collecting old dented helmets for scrap metal, and really making the adventurers work for every last gold piece.  The idea seems to keep the adventurers poor so they have a natural motivation to take whatever crappy plot hook the DM throws in front of them - or risk getting thrown out on the street as paupers.  It's adversarial and risks making the campaign about defeating the DM's attempts to strip wealth, versus letting the players find fun things to do with the money.  Even Conan got to be king eventually.

I prefer a different approach, which is to continue to ramp up the campaign challenges and provide natural outlets for spending the money.  Adventurers don't follow the same rules as everyone else in the campaign world.    They are the proverbial sports heroes and rock stars of the campaign world.  Their extravagant income is matched only by extravagant needs and expenses.  Giving the players the chance to actually spend the money they've earned is an opportunity to let them make interesting decisions and exercise choice and resource planning.

One of the largest potential expenses is new magic items, especially the expendables and charged items.  I'm going to assume that if ancient dungeons filled with magic and treasures are a real thing in your campaign world, and the adventurers aren't unique, that there are places in the world where magic items are bought and sold, and places where adventurers with way too much cash can go and get their own bespoke magic items made to order.  The meager sword +1 is 5,000gp new, and that high level suit of leather +3 the thief really needs is going to set him back 35,000gp.  Engaging in the magic economy is going to drain money quickly.

Providing campaign incentives for the characters to invest in strongholds, churches, wizard laboratories, and hiring large staffs of NPC's is another natural outgrowth of mid-level play, which progresses into the need to outfit armies and conquer domains in high level play.

The tricks of the "gotcha" style of DM are still fair in small doses - taxes and salvage fees from local rulers skims money off the top, as does a little bit of protection money paid to the thieves' guild.  In fact, one reason mid-level characters need to look at strongholds and lots of retainers is because their own hoards can be targeted by lower level adventurers and thieves while they're in the dungeon deeps!

Embrace the power fantasy aspect of the old school gaming style.  I don't know about you, I'm not fantastically wealthy, and I have to 'punch a clock' Monday through Friday just like everyone else.  Part of the escape of this style of gaming is getting to play a character where money stops being a problem.  When the characters decide to go on an ocean voyage, they go and buy a ship and crew - because they can.  Fantastic wealth doesn't stop sports stars from suiting up to play the next game, and it's not going to stop your players from tackling their next challenge either.  Money is a powerful resource.  The players are going to earn a ton of money in a long term dungeon campaign.  Embrace the challenge of providing creative reasons to spend it and keep the game about player choice and resource management.

Puzzles and the Dungeon

The Dungeon of Taenarum substitutes a "mad god" for the "mad wizard' who normally has created a sprawling, multi-level dungeon complex.  Because it's meant to embody the archetypal dungeoneering experience, it needs to have lots of puzzles.  I'd also like to work in some of the classic word puzzles, like the knights and knaves puzzle (the one with the two guys, one always tells the truth, the other always lies...it featured in the movie Labyrinth).  Since Taenarum will get explored by kids and family, this would be their first exposure to a lot of the classic puzzles.

Before I go on - please share any of your favorite puzzles or riddles in the comments!  Taenarum involves around 40 dungeon areas, so I'll have plenty of room to incorporate the classics.

Most of my puzzle-solving experience comes from the video gaming world and early computer games.  Let's take a look at how some of the common puzzle types carry over into RPGs.

For starters, puzzles tend to be either self-contained or not… single room or multi room.  You have the design space to make single room puzzles more arbitrary and difficult, because the players can just walk away.  Pro tip:  don’t build your dungeon so that the players can't bypass a difficult and illogical puzzle!  Riddles and Interaction puzzles are single room puzzles that are common in the dungeon.  Interaction puzzles are things like figuring out how to trigger a secret door, or disarming a trap.  I love putting in objects as resources that allow the players to interact with the environment... like using the wood to build a bridge and cross a chasm.  Video games also feature self-contained Mini-Games (ie, timewasters) but I don't see as many of those in dungeons.

Multi-room puzzles involve Information puzzles and Inventory items.  The most basic inventory puzzles is "the key" - finding the right key for an otherwise locked door.  Old time computer games frequently featured item puzzles that made the player find the right single use item for a circumstance… like giving the food from 3 to the hungry bear in room 7 in order to keep going; a more complicated model involved mixing items (like mixing the poison and the food to get rid of the bear completely).  Quests for magic items and artifacts are the meat and drink of fantasy adventure gaming, but otherwise we don't see a lot of Zork-style inventory use.

The other type of multi-room puzzle is informational - using a piece of information or pattern found elsewhere to solve a puzzle.  The classic examples is the combination to a safe - you can't open the lock until you find where the combination is hidden.

I'm sure most of this is old-hat to the readership, so at worst I've attached labels to things you already knew implicitly.  I'm mainly cataloging the puzzle types for self-reference and to remind myself of a few maxims:   If a puzzle is a blocker, make sure it's logical and fairly solvable; reserve the arbitrary puzzles for areas that can be bypassed.  Let the players learn about the problem before they encounter the possible solutions, so they're asking the right questions about the environment.  Finally, the table top medium allows a degree of lateral thinking and player creativity unsupported by computers, so don't design puzzles with only a single pre-formed solution in mind.

I've got the first 100+ rooms of Taenarum stocked and ready for adventurers.  In my zeal to learn how the Anti-Beedo would make a dungeon, I've heavily leveraged random tables.  "Special" rooms and puzzles are hard.   There's no short cut to creating them beyond perspiration and diligence.  Self-contained rooms and puzzles frequently come across as a bit arbitrary, whereas the multi-room style of puzzle requires more forethought - and works best if it enhances the overall theme of the dungeon.  I've found myself taking a step back a few times to lay the foundation for the multi-room puzzles.  The effort is worth it as I assume they'll become nice quests as players learn about them.

Puzzles are a big topic.  I'll circle back and look at some of my favorite puzzles from TSR and some OSR products as a follow up to this post and see what insights we can learn from those that have gone before.

Dungeon Areas in Taenarum

The Road to Hades is a large vaulted passage, carved in murals, that  spirals into the depths of the earth, culminating on the shores of the River Styx.  There are also stairs, chutes, and shafts that connect the sub levels to each other, but I like the conceit of a wide highway to hell that spirals into the earth - the benighted path trod by Herakles and Orpheus when they visited death's kingdom in the days of myth.

I'm planning 4 dungeons per dungeon level.  At this point all I have is a brief concept for most of them.  There are monster tables for levels 1-5, and maps for levels 1-3. I've just started running the stockers.

Once we get past level 3, the sub levels are really just place holders - I've carved out a bit of mental real estate and constructed a container for future ideas.  If an idea jumps to mind as you're browsing the list, feel free to post your inspiration in the comments.  Since this is for the family (first and foremost) I'm holding myself to a few over-arching constraints; I'm going to leverage standard bestiaries for most of the monsters, along with mostly standard magic items and classes.  Taenarum will encourage an archetypal D&D experience - something you could probably run with Moldvay BX or Labyrinth Lord (there's a good chance I'll use ACKS) .  Taenarum is definitely a "funhouse dungeon" or "monster zoo", and that's fine - Hades built it to be that way.  As god of wealth, he ensures there's always reasons for adventurers to return again and again.  Hades gets to bet house money because in the end, the house always wins.  Muhaha.

Here are the area concepts so far:

1-1 Entrance Halls
The entrance halls are a transition area between the surface and the underworld, and many of the lairs and monsters include humans - bandits, traders, acolytes, other adventuring parties, that kind of stuff.

1-2 Skeletal Legions
The Lord of the Bones is the first archon and he commands an army of skeletons.  This area also features flesh-eating scarabs that strip victims to the bone, preparing their remains to join the Legion.

1-3 Vermin Caves
It's not wise to fool with Mother Nature!  Demeter's power runs amok here, creating "the food of the gods", a milky substance that causes vermin to grow to giant size - giant beetles, giant rats, giant bees, the whole gamut of giant vermin monsters come from here.  Yes, that means there's even a giant killer chicken.

1-4 The Animal Farm
Atalante the sorceress turns captured men into pig men (orcs).  Sometimes she turns men into pigs, and she feeds the pigs to her pig men.  Her pig men scour the first level trying to capture adventurers to drag back to Atalante and get the treatment.

2-1 Zombie Vaults
Noxious fumes from the Asphodel Fields create a treacherous no-man's land that causes the dead to rise as zombies.  Portcullises and sliding walls ensure folks trapped in no-man's land have to move forward, not backwards.  (No matter how hard I try, I can't completely escape the inclination to include some horror-related elements.  Players are just going to have to deal.)

2-2 Berserker Base
Cultists of Ares (male berserkers) have a shrine in the dungeon, as do their enemies, the Amazons (female berserkers).  Opposed factions are fun.

2-3 Mountain Side Caves
Inspired by drum circles, Burning Man, industrial music mosh pits, and Rabbit in the Moon at Red Rocks Amphitheater, no Greek themed dungeon would be complete without  Dionysian Maenads, dancing Oreads, and drum-crazed Satyrs celebrating the Great God Pan.  Who wants a mushroom?

2-4 Naiad Pools
Drowning faeries seriously creep me out.  Reference:  drowning fairies.

3-1 The Harpy Halls
Harpies = iconic Greek monster.  They fly and steal stuff.

3-2 Cultes Des Ghouls
Winding warrens of the Ghoul King.

3-3 Temple of Hecate
A passage to the dark world and the source of all the goblins and spooks that roam the upper levels.

3-4 The Faerie Shrine
I don't see any reason why to exclude sprites, pixies, unicorns, and sylvan creatures from a Greek-themed dungeon - they fit the Artemis vs Pan theme of orderly sylvan nature vs chaotic untamed nature.

4-1 Centaurs of Doom
Centaurs are the biker gang barbaric trouble makers of Greek myth - they have bad attitudes.  Don't invite them to the wedding.  Just ask the Lapiths.

4-2 Darkhome
The Prince of Darkness, lord of the shadows, is the archon that rules this dungeon, where light sources frequently fail.

4-3 The Petrified Procession
Medusas = iconic Greek monster.

4-4 The Pandemonium Shadow Show
Clowns, circuses, giant-headed Carnivale puppets, they're all nightmare fuel to me.  No funhouse dungeon should be without a creepy fun house.  (I do want some things in here that emphasize theater, tragedy, masks, and performance).

5-1 Water Caves
The historical Cape Taino has seaside caves and hosted a temple to Poseidon.  Tritons are another iconic Greek monster, although my tritons will end up more like slimy Deep Ones or the Kuo Toa.

5-2 Hags of the Fates
Graeae, the blind hags who shared an eyeball, are iconic Greek monsters and needed a place.

5-3 Enclave of the Returned
This is a free zone where escaped souls from Hades have built an underground refuge (the dungeon's version of Rick's Café is here).

5-4 Brother Barrow's Tombkeepers Inc.
Brother Barrow, the fifth archon, treats the entombment of dead heroes like a church business.  Hail Hades.

6-1 Ragehollow
The mythical labyrinth hosting Taenarum's angry minotaurs.

6-2 The Monster Mash
The spawning grounds of the hydras of Taenarum.

6-3 Halls of Greater Dread
The sixth archon is a powerful wraith (a rag-shrouded figure like the Witch King or a Nazgul).

6-4 Workshops of the Forge God
Robots!

7-1 Lesser Temple of Hades
TBD

7-2 The Great Library
The dungeon will have access to a cosmic library - or perhaps a portal to something like the great library of Celaneo or HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands.  The 7th archon is a mummified philosopher.  The custodians of knowledge - the Keepers - are all mummies, too.

7-3 The Jersey Devils
Placeholder for a fortress of devils  and the Furies.  Their job is to capture lost souls that escape Hades by swimming the Lethe river.  They don't mind sending new souls down to Hades when they get the chance (ie, whenever they meet adventurers they try to kill them).

7-4 The Giants
The Gigantomachy features in Greek myth, so I know I want giants to have a role in the depths.  Hades doesn't mind reaching across the aisle to recruit players from the other team.

8-1 Nightmare Town
The eighth archon is a powerful spectre with  a pumpkin head and a chilling cackle.  The area features a passage to Morpheus's realm of dreams and nightmares.

8-2 Aah!  Real Demons
The demons cause destruction and chew bubblegum, and they're all out of gum.  On  a more serious note, the overarching goal of the Demon Prince is to release the great monsters of Tartarus by destroying the prison.

8-3 Redoubt of the Immortal
One of the great architects of the prison of Tartarus, from a bygone age, was gifted with immortality and has built an impregnable lair for himself here.  The demons would love to get a hold of him.  I'm picturing an ancient progenitor of Daedalus - someone with knowledge that's too dangerous to be allowed to roam free.

8-4 Elemental Prisons
Clues to the locations of the four elemental artifacts that must be brought together to open Tartarus.  Lots of elementals and elemental creatures are bound to the area as guardians.  (The artifacts themselves are elsewhere in the multiverse as high level quest items).

9-1 Remember the Titans
The primordial titans are the great threats to world peace; I want some of the lesser Titans to have a role in the dungeon as troublemakers.

9-2 The Blood Boss's Throne of Blood
The ninth archon is a powerful vampire lord.

9-3 Lair of an Ancient Dragon
Must have a gigantic dragon in a classic dungeon.  Must.

9-4 Greater Temple of Hades
TBD.

10-1 Defile of the Demon Prince
An interplanar beachhead between the Abyss and the Prime Plane hosts frequent skirmishes between demons and the followers of Hades.

10-2 Lair of the Great Theurge
The 10th archon is a powerful lich.

10-3 Planar Embassies
Just outside the gates of Hades, many of the great powers of the universe have a portal or gateway to the underworld.  This is the player's chance to jaunt to the City of Brass, for instance, or visit Asgard.

10-4 The Shores of Styx
Charon, Cerberus, the River Styx - you know it.  The good stuff.

Nodes of Taenarum

Here's the next design piece on the adventure oriented megadungeon I've been working on.  I'm going to use the term 'adventure' rather than family-oriented to indicate it's not necessarily only for kids, it just won't feature horror and gruesomeness like my default mode.  The genre is fantasy and high magic, i.e. "adventure".

What I needed were good monster tables that could be plugged into the random dungeon stocker.  I wanted to have tables that were populated differently based on the dungeon level and sub theme.  Therefore, I needed to quickly think up some of the major themes, as well as plots and factions.

This early in the process, nothing is set in stone, but I wanted a starting point for some of the major players in the dungeon.  The overarching theme is competition between the gods:  the gods want their champions to rise in power and experience by conquering monsters and getting treasure; Hades wants to one-up the other gods by killing all their champions in his vast dungeons and adding their spirits to his army.  To that end, he employs "archons", intelligent undead that act as bosses on each level.  They command level-appropriate undead throughout the dungeon and actively hunt and thwart adventurers - characters like the Lord of Bones or the Ghoul King.  Plus, they're replaceable - the mantle of Lord of Bones can be passed on to the next promising candidate if an upstart group knocks off the last Lord of Bones.  (In other words, there are plausible reasons to quickly restock certain areas, as the archons back fill whenever there's a "promotion opportunity").

Other factions in the dungeon include various lost souls that have escaped the Asphodel Meadows.  They're not living, so they can't return to the surface world, but by forming enclaves in the underworld, they've escaped the drudgery of Hades.  Servants of Hades (the devils and the furies) search the dungeon for these escapees.

Hecate is not an Olympian and desires to see the 12 Olympians overthrown.  She rules a parallel world of magic, the dark realm, and her goblins and demons slip into the dungeon from the dark realm.  Although she's an erstwhile ally of Hades, her secret desire is to throw open the elemental gates of Tartarus, releasing the primordial monsters.  Not even Hades is that reckless.

There is an elemental sub theme to Taenarum, since the prison of Tartarus can only be opened by bringing together four elemental artifacts from the dawn of the universe.  There are groups seeking the artifacts and others striving to keep them hidden and guarded.  The Great God Pan would like to see the world returned to primordial chaos and uncontrolled nature, and his minions are among the seekers after elemental mastery.

Hephaestus has no love for the haughty Olympians and has lent Hades the use of many automatons and mechanical monsters.  Yay, robots!

Beyond those factions, I picked lots of Greek-themed monsters from the various bestiaries and created a list of sub themes for each major dungeon level.  At this point, I'm trying to get the first three dungeon levels mapped and stocked before letting players loose on the place.  All the stockers and monster lists are built, and I have 9 of the 12 maps done.  The bare-bones approach lets you cover vast ground really quickly.

Here's the list.  Names will change over time, and I'll circle back in a day or two to add a descriptive sentence to each node to give folks a flavor on each area.

Dungeon Areas in Taenarum:

• Entrance Halls
• Skeletal Legions
• Vermin Caves
• The Animal Farm
• Zombie Vaults
• Berserker Base
• Mountain Side Caves
• Naiad Pools
• The Harpy Halls
• Cultes Des Ghouls
• Temple of Hecate
• The Faerie Shrine
• Centaurs of Doom
• Darkhome
• The Petrified Procession
• The Pandemonium Shadow Show
• Water Caves
• Hags of the Fates
• Enclave of the Returned
• Brother Barrow's Tombkeepers Inc.
• Ragehollow
• The Monster Mash
• Halls of Greater Dread
• Workshops of the Forge God
• Lesser Temple of Hades
• The Great Library
• The Jersey Devils
• The Giants
• Nightmare Town
• Aah!  Real Demons
• Redoubt of the Immortal
• Elemental Prisons
• Remember the Titans
• The Blood Boss's Throne of Blood
• Lair of an Ancient Dragon
• Greater Temple of Hades
• Defile of the Demon Prince
• Lair of the Great Theurge
• Planar Embassies
• The Shores of Styx

Top Down Versus Bottom Up

The Anti-Beedo Returns

You're probably familiar with the terms "top down" or "bottom up"; they're frequently used in the business world  for planning, and I've seen them used in design and software development as well.  We'll frequently specify a top down or bottoms up approach to generating a project plan or a budget, for instance.

Top down revolves around decomposition; set an overall target or objective, and then break down that monolithic piece until you're down to the right level of detail.  "The software budget this year is $XX dollars; let's allocate that to the different business units based on their percentage of the overall headcount".  You won't know the details of how you're spending those software dollars until much further along in the process, but you're progressively decomposing the overall budget until you get to the requisite level of detail, while staying within those overarching constraints set at the beginning.

A bottoms up approach is the opposite; you'd start with the actual departments, aggregate their detailed software development requests, assign dollar values, and generate a budget by rolling up the sums from the lowest level of detail.  Sometimes those roll ups put you way off target!

That's a brief introduction to the terms; the reasons why to use one approach over another is a different matter.  However, this is a gaming blog, so let's swing the discussion back around to dungeons.  Part of my decision to step outside my normal thinking (to become... The Anti-Beedo) was to apply a top down approach to the latest dungeon.

Beedo always used to start with the details of rooms, encounters, lairs, and inhabitants and assemble the maps piecemeal later; the Anti-Beedo wants to start with the maps, and use random stockers to blow out lots of content, and work out the details later.

The top down approach dictated a 10-level dungeon (the way Gary meant it to be), with the thinking that each level will target 100-120 rooms, divided into 3-4 themes or sub levels on each major level.  I quickly put together maps for the first two dungeon levels (8 individual mapped areas) and built the appropriate random stockers.  I'm going to circle back and complete the 4 maps for level 3, add the random stockers for level 3, and then spend a little time elaborating the details, reconciling inconsistencies, moving things around necessary.  Three levels is more than enough content to launch a game.  Overall, the top down approach seems to generate a large scope blindingly fast.  This new dungeon will be fully armed and operational extremely quickly.  (The emperor will be pleased with my progress).

I've gone with the Greek myth theme.  It's high fantasy and can leverage existing D&D bestiaries and take advantage of classic D&D "as is" without being Tolkein.  I can direct the kiddos to Xena and Hercules, Percy Jackson and Clash of the Titans, for inspiration and ideas and character concepts.  The dungeon revolves around the legendary Road to Hell Hades - a winding passage into the depths of the Earth, culminating at the River Styx, Charon the Ferryman, Cerberus, and the gates to Hades' Realm.

I previously discussed the ideas as "Death Mountain", and you can see the original inspiration here:  Death Mountain.  Unfortunately, I'm now planning on putting the dungeon near a coastal sea cave and cliff, with nary a mountain in sight, so I'm probably going to secure a new name.  ("The Vaults of Pluton" is my mental front runner).  In the next few days, I'll provide more insight into the top down design, how I built the random stockers, and so forth.  It's been a pretty interesting exercise.  Liberating, even.  If you have ideas for a name, suggestions are welcome.  Especially something in Greek or Greek-sounding.  You guys are a smart group of readers, I'm sure there's someone out there with a background in Classics or antiquities.

The Dungeon as Estuary

Context:  A gigantic, multi-level dungeon, where dungeon level = monster level.

Problem:  Why do creatures of the same relative power level congregate on the same dungeon level?

Answer:  The dungeon represents an estuary, a confluence of diametric forces - Chaos and Law.  The very deepest sections of the dungeon open upon otherworldly vistas and allow the forces of Chaos to bleed into the world; the surface bathes in the light of the sun, the ultimate symbol of Law.  The dungeon is a brackish mix of diminishing Law and increasing Chaos the deeper it extends.

The powerful magical monsters and creatures of Chaos can only freely exist in the depths of the dungeon, closer to the source of ultimate Chaos.  Each level they ascend brings them closer to Law and increases their discomfort; at most, such creatures will normally be found a maximum of 1-2 dungeon levels above their normal encounter level, returning to the depths at the first opportunity.

Likewise, the increasing power level of the denizens of the dungeon depths places a limit on how deep surface dwellers can penetrate the dungeon depths before the danger overwhelms them.

I'm not sure how far I can ride this particular metaphor, but I was looking for a solution as to why orcs live on level 1, and gnolls on level 2, and ogres on level 3, and the ogres sometimes raid level 1 and 2, but have their permanent lairs on level 3, and so on.

This idea that Chaos and Law drives each other away can be taken beyond the dungeon, too.  Creatures of Chaos have free reign on the surface during the hours of night, when the withering eye of the sun is hidden away.  Chaotic fairy magic melts with the coming dawn, and the undead return to their graveyards and tombs before the first ray of sun.

I keep hearing "Night on Bald Mountain" melting away into "Ave Maria" when I think of it this way, but that's just me.  I've seen Disney's Fantasia movies over and over again.

From an Alternate Universe - Meet the Anti-Beedo

Or, A Theoretical Framework for Building the Sandbox Megadungeon

Yesterday's post concluded with this delightful challenge:
Pick One:  Do I want to spend my time working on the kind of dungeon that I, as referee, will never expect to finish, or work on the kind of dungeon the players will never expect to finish?

Although I've called out various projects on the blog as "megadungeons", I would submit they fall more into the camp of 'dungeons I may never finish' rather than 'dungeons so large the players may never finish them'.  It's very hard to write both briefly and evocatively, so they end up more detailed and wordy than I'd like, and my pace of development is usually just ahead of the players instead of miles ahead of them.  One snap of burnout or gamer attention deficit disorder, and BAM - we're on to something else, like Cthulhu gaming.  Then who knows if they'll ever get finished.

Let's take a look at how Harrow Home is being constructed.  I've previously stated the map is the very last thing that gets done by me.  I start with a notebook and create a written scheme for each level, identifying set pieces and major characters and encounter areas.  I spend a lot of time in meetings or traveling with my notebook, so I'm able to jot notes all the time.  The scope of the map is bound by the extent of my written notes.  The encounter ideas and set pieces are adjusted as necessary to fit the map, then I circle back and embellish any filler areas or empty spaces.

Maybe what follows isn't serious advice, but it goes something like this:  When you need to do something differently than how you're doing it, imagine how another person behaves, and then just act like the other guy.

So how would the Anti-Beedo approach a gigantic megadungeon project?  (Here's an aside about poor Beedo.  My blogger handle, Beedo, is gone.  I recently took the G+ plunge and it merged my G+ and blogger accounts.  Alas poor Beedo!  I knew him.  A fellow of infinite jest.  Now all of you are stuck with me).

Our imaginary Anti-Beedo starts with the map - the bigger the better.  I'm not terribly creative at drawing, so let's go find an appropriate random dungeon generator.  (If you know of a random generator you like, the Anti-Beedo would be grateful if you shared it in the comments).

Next up, the Anti-Beedo needs to quickly stock this monstrous thing.  I have no problem 'programming' in Excel to create a random dungeon stocker; I've frequently used the algorithms from Moldvay's Basic.  The content is another matter.

First off, you'll need a gigantic bestiary to go along with those gigantic maps.  I really liked the encounter tables from AD&D Monster Manual 2, from back in the day.  All the monsters were given ratings of Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Very Rare, and the encounter tables used bell curves assigning rarity based on a slot in the curve.  I could get behind that type of approach for structuring a large bestiary.

The esteemed Hack and Slash blog has a lot of resources for generating tricks and traps - I've used Courtney's trap generation tables plenty (check out the OSR resources area in his sidebar).  That'd be my first place to help fill out random stockers for tricks and traps.  I had heard someone was putting an index together for the 1d12 guy - The Dungeon Dozen (indeed - there is a fantastic index here).  Are there any other resources you guys like to use for tricks, traps, and specials?

You see where this is going.  Phase 1 of the Anti-Beedo's project is to draw maps - huge maps.  Anti-Beedo starts with the task I usually do dead last.  Phase 2 involves the creation of a giant bestiary, and tables for generating flavorful tricks, traps, and specials.  While I spend my time on "story" and cool encounter ideas, the Anti-Beedo mocks at such efforts this early in the process.  Randomize it up, baby.  Run your crazy dungeon stocker algorithm through dice rolls, Excel, a programming language, whatever.  Voila, you have the barebones for an instant megadungeon.  A gigantic megadungeon.

Phase 3 is actually going through the room by room descriptions and jotting in some brief notes that make sense of it all - incorporating the dungeon's back story, adding motivations or plots to the inhabitants, creating explanations for the placement of lairs, and so forth.  The stuff I usually do first, the Anti-Beedo tackles last.  And instead of jotting idle thoughts in his spare time months in advance, the Anti-Beedo saves it for game prep the week of the game.  He's all about the "just in time preparation".

Up until now, this has been a thought experiment.  Should it go any further?  Could I take one of my ideas and jam it through the Anti-Beedo's madness and see what comes out the other side?  I'm intrigued that the end result is potentially a vast, lightly detailed locale that provides a strong framework for improvisation - but allows the referee to elaborate between sessions.