Steal the Eyes ... Scratch That

That feeling when you're playtesting your long-delayed megadungeon and there's a 20' high bird god idol with glowing orange eyes and one of your players -- who has in fact probably never seen this picture:

follows her rogue's instinct to climb up and see if those eyes are a) gems and b) pry-able ...

but no, they are just magic light cast on stone eyes.

In what is not really a fit of pique and more like dogged mission completion mode, she then takes hammer and chisel and chips off all the light-bearing stone, raining a shower of little half-glowing, candle-strength chips on the floor ...

which turn out to be a useful small treasure in their own right.

Confirming that it's much more fun to redraw the path of ages, then follow it.

Megadungeon Playtest Without the Dungeon

Last Saturday in London we had a small meetup of variously 8-10 Old School gamers who couldn't wait for Dragonmeet (wait, Dragonmeet has an updated website and schedule in early October? Surely these are the last days and times...)

In the corner of a pub near Euston Station, it was decided that I should run the first game, an encounter with pregenerated 52 Pages first-levels going after the low-level bandits holed up in caves near the entrance of my megadungeon project, Manden Gouge.

A rough idea of the style

I haven't talked much about this project - preferring to show rather than tell, perhaps overcorrecting for the tendency of gamers to hype vaporware.  As of now I have about 120 areas written up, enough for the first installment, which now lacks only a bunch of connecting material. The design goals are:

• Emphasis on exploration, finding out the history of the nearly abandoned castle Karthew's Legacy and the warrens beneath.
• Setting-neutral - can be dropped into almost any pseudo-European fantasy world with few assumptions about the universe
• Subverting cliches -- few things, be they monsters or treasure, are "by the book"
• Detailed rather than general descriptions -- but detail for a purpose.
• "Gormenghast" feel to the upper rooms and cellars of the castle -- a society of eccentric inhabitants, with mad and dangerous things lurking in the corners, left by a long line of previous weirdos
• Run-friendly, with detail maps and monster stats on the same page as descriptions
• Lots of goodies -- a menu table, social relations map, reference illustrations for the player, a dream dungeon-within-the-dungeon, family tree and heraldry

And that's all folks - no Kickstarter, no hype, no set date. You'll see it when it's here.

Anyway, following up a mission hook to deal with some bandits with the advantage of night-vision, the party decided to set a counter-ambush for the bandits and then lure them out of their cave, managing to bag the leader under a dropped goods cart thanks to Barry's creative abuse of the Featherweight spell. So the megadungeon playtest never entered the megadungeon. But I'll be damned if I railroad.

Eggs on a Plate Without the Plate - Salvador Dali

Then Barry took the reins for an adventure in Tekumel using Lamentations rules -- a really nice introduction to that exotic and hierarchical setting that had the party carrying out a tenement eviction, with rainy, moldy atmospherics that brought to mind a cross between The Raid and Se7en.

It was a great day with the opportunity to put faces to a lot of names across the British blogosphere and G+alaxy. I hope there's another such one of these days.

What's a Megadungeon?

JD Jarvis at Aeons and Auguries wants to know what constitutes a megadungeon.

Here's my short answer, assuming that "levels" and "experience points" are relevant in your game.

• It is a single adventuring site with multiple areas of increasing difficulty (challenge levels)
• with enough "experience points" (rewards of adventuring relevant to character  advancement) in each "challenge level"
• that two or more adventuring parties can advance to the character level needed to confront the next challenge level, without intruding on each other's sources of experience.

In other words, if in your game a single party will level up after exploring 30 rooms, then each level should have 60 rooms or more to be a megadungeon. To be clear, my definition is not so much about whether the megadungeon literally takes on multiple parties, but more about whether a single party feels that they have a great deal of freedom to get to the next level in multiple ways.

Anonymous, from plagmada,org

Compare this to the more typical adventure-based campaign where each individual adventure site gives all or part of the experience to advance one level. In that kind of campaign, multiple parties can coexist by visiting different adventure sites, instead of the same one.

Right now I'm running one of each kind of campaign and they each have their own rewards -- the multi-site campaign has a lot of breadth and variety while the single-site campaign offers intensity and the development of a strange, obsessive legendry over  multiple visits.

She Wields the Powers of Narrativism

Work on my megadungeon project proceeds at a snail's pace but with frequent rewards. Here's my favorite NPC from a group of scheming remnants trapped in the upper works, Castle Amber-style.

Thelma, the Perpetual Student. Age: 31.
Level 3 Wizard (Narrativist), 5 HP. INT++, CON-, CHA-

Portrait: Jeff Preston

Thelma wandered here from her studies at a great and advanced academy, having heard about the strange situation in the castle from some visitors who managed to escape. As a philosopher she became a convert to Narrativism, the idea that almost everyone in the world is a secondary character in an elaborate fiction, with memories whose fallibility and vagueness betrays their false nature.

The Narrativist obsession is to identify point-of-view characters, people whose experience seems too vivid and fortunate to be true, and who may in fact assist in making contact with the Author through self-referential and meta-textual occurrences. Thelma thinks that Myrseau may be one such character, and is certain that she herself is but a secondary character, who will cease to exist once she leaves the fiction’s main setting, the Castle.

Of course, Thelma is ultimately correct, although wrong in the particulars. The characters she seeks belong to the players, and with enough exposure to their fortunes and ambitions, Thelma will eventually realize that the work she is in is not a novel, but a game. This may even lead her to develop a Narrativist heresy: that there is a Game Master who responds to the free will of multiple, self-narrating characters rather than ordaining their fates. On making this realization, she will decide to leave the castle, and never be heard from again, her meta-textual work done.

Thelma is an aloof and enigmatic character who sometimes gives the impression of being as detached from the concerns and intrigues of the Remnants as the players are. She once thought Imogen was the point of view character, but having seen her grow through adolescence, pities her as an obvious inversion of the fictional ingénue trope. Her philosophy gives her a certain ability similar to knowledge magic, with the following “spells” that she may cast, silently and without gesture, once each per day: hear internal monologue (ESP); interpret symbolism (Know Alignment); foreshadowing (Detect Evil); predict plot (Augury).

Download: Cellars of the Castle Ruins

All right. I've dithered about this before but now have decided to make and distribute a couple of low-effort, not too fancy pdfs with the megadungeon level I wrote three years ago.

To recap, it was written at a time when Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage was available for free download but lacked a level 1. I wrote one for my own use, trying to match the antic humor of the lower levels, and ran many an adventure on this and level 2. Now that the print release of the full Castle is in sight, but not too soon, I figured I would let everyone else know what I did with my replacement for the almost-impossible-to-get level 1 of Gary Gygax's "Castle Zagyg," from which COTMA follows.

I urge everyone to run out and get the full COTMA from BRW Games when it releases next year. In addition to the official completion of the upper works and level 1, Joe is promising us annotations of the sparsely keyed rooms. As I've mentioned on more than one occasion, COTMA as written has many hidden features that only really emerge in actual play. As a result, its area keys read as under-featured, when there's actually a lot of interaction and possibilities. It's great that the annotations will let the casual reader appreciate the subtleties of this design - one of the few complete megadungeons out there, a conscious attempt to recreate Gary's legendary pile while building a lot onto the scraps of information that remain.

In the meantime, not wanting to spend too much time on layout, I've released the Cellars as a level key and separate, large scale map because I couldn't get Acrobat to play nice and shrink the map to a single page. You should be able to print the map as a fairly legible single sheet, though, if you play around with the Adobe pdf settings. This is not ideal - I much prefer a format I'm using in my own slowly developing megadungeon, where each page of text has an inset of its map section and notes on all creatures encountered there. But it allows me to get this out there.

Anyway, enjoy! Download links are to the right under "Rules and Tools".

Stonehell: Dungeon Poetics Improved

As promised in the last critique, let's take a look at how Michael Curtis' Stonehell megadungeon works with creativity, meaning and description.

Turning to a random page of descriptive text, we get a nice coincidence: the picked-over starting area of the box canyon makes a good comparison against the picked-over starting area of room 1 of Undermountain. Let me reformat here for purposes of criticism, starting at a random place ...

This monument is a minor climax to a thematic series of rooms that started with a feeling of evil and then presented the classic skeletons rising from the bones to attack. This is how you do a picked-over secret compartment! The description wastes almost no words. Not so much an anticlimax as an antEclimax ... a minor mystery appropriate for an underwhelming area, hinting at undeveloped vistas.

The friendly bear is a good hook, especially as developed elsewhere in the book as a kind of dungeon legend/good luck sign. The only false note: 64 cp, that doesn't sit well with the bear's habit of bringing up things to gnaw on. (Question that low-level penny jar every time!) Better cheap treasure: leather strap with silver buckles. The empty cave is less empty than it seems, a pretty obvious temptation to camp in case the town is too far or too "hot."

"I've got some outdoor caves and I'm going to put outdoor critters in them" part 2. Here, too, there is meaning soft-pedaled below the surface, a story that's almost told. What happened to the hermit? The brigand? Does knowing about the mad hermit and his pet puma in Keep of the Borderland help clarify things? That's a nice touch, if intentional. The scarf is maybe one detail too many - everything else invites use.

Compared with the last examples, it's clear that Stonehell aims for less but delivers more. There's no need to spell everything out, and themes are possible but subtle, rewarding exploration in nice ways.

Dungeon Poetics

When I used to write poetry (that other, extinct hobby of mine that hewed closer to my twentysomething New York idea of adulthood) I ended up setting two rules for myself: Write concisely; avoid cliches. In hindsight I would have done well to add a third: The damn thing must still mean something.

These laws work equally well for adventure writing. This genre, too, requires striking imagery to succeed; rewards going behind the scenes to find new connections and insights. And yes, the damn thing must still mean something - how you get there is your own concern, but imaginative fiction does not simply mean pulling six-legged animals named smeerps out of a hat and making them whistle Dixie. There has to be some evocative link to a consistent and rooted world, no matter how strange or oblique, to make it work.

I realized this connection after Zak S recently dicussed the legendary megadungeon disappointments, 3rd edition Castle Greyhawk and 2nd edition Undermountain. The former was shown up to be full of cliches and meaningless misses, the latter full of padding.

But besides mining the "gem" ideas from those clunkers, what would it take to make them more meaningful? Let's take a closer look at Old-School whipping boy Undermountain - specifically, the first room of the first level - then Old School Revival whipping boy Dwimmermount - three rooms from a page chosen at random. I can't get the image to size just right, so you're probably going to have to click to read it.

Even leaving out the boxed text, Ed Greenwood's Undermountain room 1 presents a no-fun-house of random features that lead nowhere and contribute nothing to the sense of gradual discovery through exploration. When the off-message and filler material is removed, we're left with a sly,mocking marker that this is the starting room of the weakest level: 1 rat, 1 gold piece, enjoy. The hidden compartment is actually a much better anticlimax if it's empty. A smart party will find ways to use it as a cache. Using this logic the DM can do a better job of figuring out what might actually, reasonably be cached there.

Speaking of rats and small change, let's give James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount more of a chance by looking at its deeper levels. For purpose of criticism, here are three rooms from the top of a randomly chosen page of the backer draft, which happens to be on level 5. Comments on the right.

With Dwimmermount, there's better style but similar problems in substance: the prose is lots more economical, but meaning and unique twists still prove elusive, although they are there.

I think the main problem of both these and similar efforts is, well, that they're megadungeons. The amount of time required to put poetic craft into each and every one of a thousand or more rooms is practically impossible. Some corners inevitably have to be cut.

Greenwood did it by actually presenting only about 30 super-prolix rooms per level, filling the rest of the map with "do it yourself" maze wallpaper. Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage is honest about having lots of super-short room descriptions but thrives on the set-pieces and the grand plan; it helps that he's intentionally recreating the gonzo-ish Greyhawk legend, which sets low expectations for coherence and dungeon cliche avoidance to begin with. Somehow we expect more of Dwimmermount, with its much-trumpeted world, story and secrets. I haven't gotten Barrowmaze yet, but have a thumbs up for Patrick Wetmore's Anomalous Subsurface Environment, which achieves its goals by using smaller (yet still expansive) megadungeon levels and a number of creative back-stories to sow meaning. Even that one, though, isn't complete yet.

Stonehell by Michael Curtis is another interesting case. I think that deserves a post all of its own.

The B Team Can Relieve Your Campaign

A couple of recent gaming developments have made me really appreciate the practice of keeping up more than one set of characters in any long-term gaming group.

Part of my recent travels involved returning to the Cafe 28 on New York's 5th Avenue where some of the Red Box NYC games take place. Investigating, I found that a Glantri game was taking place the night before I took off back home, so I showed up to a table packed full of Erics (no, seriously, there were 4 Erics out of 7 guys at table).

One of these Erics was blogger "the Mule," who'd been present at my previous foray, and another was the GM. He ran a B/X game mostly by rules as written with some nice touches - no duplicate spell memorizing, declaring only spells and withdrawal from combat before the initiative roll. The players had maps of Eric's megadungeon from three years of continuous play, spanning five levels and hundreds of rooms. This "Chateau D'Amberville" is based on Castle Amber in the sense that The Lord of the Rings is based on the Elder Edda. It was truly a great glimpse into the potential of the format.

As it turned out, my newly rolled wizard character - Raz, son of Taz - was adventuring that evening with a B-list party consisting of players' secondary characters, mostly level 5 and 6. This explained the nonchalance when two of them got double-level drained, in merciless old school style, by some unexpected spectres, which we quickly fled from. I admired the good spirits of these players, who were evidently playing in a very free-wheeling table with drop-in party composition and multiple characters.

On returning home I unleashed the lead-in to an episode I'd been brooding over all January - a climax adventure that could take place in one session, and would cap off the plot of the "Faerie war" arc they'd been following since the summer. Today I learned the limits of plot-heavy climax adventures ... when one of the players called in sick and we realized that we just couldn't play on in this adventure without her.

So we decided to form a B-Team with the existing group, rolling up new characters and embarking ad-hoc on an adventure. The A team (Band of Iron) had started in the Valley of Milk and Cheese where I had also placed Jeff Sparks' Labyrinth Lord adventure Wheel of Evil, purchased but never engaged with, an appropriately cheese-themed adventure. And so, the new group started in the uneasy town of Renneton, got a good way into the cheese caves, and everyone seemed to enjoy the change of perspective and freedom from the burdensome importance of actions in the by now year-long main campaign.

Perhaps this is what most campaigns need past a certain point - a way to deal with missing or guest players, to blow off steam, and get the kind of fast-and-loose play that comes with an adventure rather than story focus.

The Megadungeon Paradox

As the blogosphere faces the possibility that all we'll have of Dwimmermount is a draft, critical evaluations of that draft are flooding in, from the dismissive to the constructive. One big part of the criticism - really just an extension of last summer's "9 rats, 2000 cp" beef -  is that the upper level maps are boring.

There's a reason for that, very much in keeping with the Phase 1 of the OSR that Dwimmermount represents. Phase 1 was all about copying the old stuff, with a "D&D is always right" mentality. Take a look at this paparazzi shot of Gary Gygax's Castle Greyhawk dungeon Level 1:

It's a hot mess of jammed-together, samey rooms and corridors, and from all accounts the keying was minimal. I'd rather explore even the upper levels of Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage than this map - even though the Castle is another case of a Gygax homage intentionally putting the more generic stuff up top and the wilder level designs below. (Besides, the Castle has hidden depths to its design not evident from casual skimming - as I hope to demonstrate next post.)

But from experience of actual play, consider what this design approach means. Most explorers of megadungeons never get past the early levels - just as most campaigns never reach level 10. This means that most people's megadungeon experience is intentionally boring, with the real fun deferred for a lower level that never comes.

Phase 2 of the OSR means that enjoyment and amazement take precedence over carbon-copying the old school. The goal is not to reproduce the means, but the ends, of the class of 1974 - the sense of wonder and discovery now hard to recover from a set of expectations turned cliche.

This means that megadungeons should engage from the beginning, with early levels that reward exploration with variety - not the most awesome and dazzling stuff, certainly, but fun mapping, meaningful phenomena, intriguing hints that draw explorers deeper. I've tried to follow this principle with my first-level completion for the Castle - which I'm more and more inclined to release as-is this month - and with my new mega-project, one section of which is finished.

Adventure Format: All On One Spread

Just a quick sharing of an idea I had. Working on an adventure that will form the first "leg" of a larger megadungeon (and a stand-alone experience even if the whole thing is never finished), it occurred to me to banish two of the most frequent action-stoppers when I GM -

Pausing to look up monster stats

Pausing to look up the map.

So why not take a cue from one-page dungeons without being literally one-page, putting everything you need to know to play in a given section of the adventure on one two-page spread?

Below - intentionally at low resolution for now - is how that has turned out. Beside the map is a section with minimal monster stats, and space below each monster listing to mark hit points or make notes. I'm a believer in letting DMs roll their own hit points, especially because systems disagree on what a monster hit die should be.

There's going to be a larger map that shows how all the sections hook up, and probably it's a good idea to put notes about which pages the passages off map lead to, once I have that arranged.

Megadungeon Dilemma

Well, now that Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage is no longer freeware, in preparation for its release next year complete with an original surface and first level, I have a dilemma. Some time ago I expressed my intent to release, for free or donation, the first level I designed for Joe's Castle, Cellars of the Castle Ruins, which many groups have played in for the past two years.

I'm now considering leaving Joe the completion of his project and instead pillaging some of the better ideas from my level for a new mega-project I've started on. Manden Gouge is a fate-heavy mountain pass with a long and troubled history and several linked underground areas, including the underlevels of the ruined castle known as Karthew's Legacy, the Shrine to Saint Ferdenon, the Tower of the Azure Mage, a mountainside cave complex, and the undergalleries uniting them all.

The idea with this project is to raise the bar on design, avoiding or subverting what has come before. The rats in this place are doing more than guarding some copper pieces, I guarantee! To be fair, that's also true of the Cellars, but its overall design is more freewheeling and gonzo, with many inside gaming and Greyhawk jokes.

So, which way should I go?

By Zagyg's Beard, Let's Do This!

Xounds! As from a sorcerous fogbank I have woken up and realized that school's out for the summer, the other group that was exploring it is terminally moribund, so there is no reason why I should not gather up my fairly detailed notes and map for CELLARS OF THE CASTLE RUINS, pdf it and release it upon an Old School Rumbelow seemingly producing core systems faster than it can produce sprawling gonzo megadungeon levels.

Do these three stairways look familiar?

This is the level that takes the place of that one other level of the impossible-to-get adventure supplement that finally started in on The Big Kahuna's Big Kahuna Dungeon, and that hooks up with the second level of Joe Bloch's megadungeon that finished off the Big Kahuna's unfinished business. After two years and over a dozen incursions from four separate teams of delvers, this 119-room low-level mooncalf may well be ready for prime time.

CONTENTS:
4 entry ramps
1 mysterious tavern
1 excruciating puzzle room (nearly solved at one point)
1 secret library, with bad-ass librarian
4 competing and radically different kobold tribes
1 philosopher yeti
2 trash disposals
1 massive cave-in
3 wells
2 inscrutable games-within-a-game
6 stairways down
1 stairway up

I've started layout in Publisher, and have decided on a format where each one-or-two page spread of room descriptions contains a map inset of those rooms, next to which is a key to the monster stats as given by AD&D. That's not my preferred system, but it's compatible with Mr. Bloch's opus, and I actually use the stats from Kellri's AD&D monster reference in my own more Basic/Labyrinth Lord-like game, only dialing down some of the multiple attacks (for example, one instead of two claw attacks from most animals).

To respect and not undercut the efforts of others I'll be releasing it as contribution-ware. All proceeds will be farmed directly back into the DIY roleplaying movement.

Back in My Day We Didn't Have These Fancy Megadungeons

The sight of the recently released 300 room Barrowmaze being docked points on Grognardia for not being big enough to be a true megadungeon - I guess that makes it more of a what? Macrodungeon? Kilodungeon? - reminds me that we didn't even know what the hell a megadungeon was in 1982. There were no commercially available examples of the art, and only a few oblique references to Castle Greyhawk in the Dungeon Master's Guide.

To us, megadungeons were boring. In the absence of any guidance from TSR, our DM started us off with three levels of what, in hindsight, was inspired by the only available megadungeon examples at the time: PC dungeon games such as Wizardry or Bard's Tale, which we also played avidly. In other words, a monster motel punctuated by traps.

By the time we reached third level of this dungeon, we were clamoring for a more "mature" experience, more similar to the published modules we were starting to read. Adventures with a plot and a climax and in different parts of the world map. Nobody we knew was running a megadungeon, and even less so through the story-obsessed 80's and 90's. When Undermountain came out, it seemed more of a curio than a model for emulation. Impressive, certainly, but would you actually want to nail your campaign down in one place for years at a time?

Really, what we're doing under the banner of the Old School Renaissance is much cooler than 99% of our actual old school experiences with D&D. Essentially, we are finally appreciating and spreading the practices of the close Gygax/Arneson circle that never made it out to the masses in any published product. Megadungeons are part of that, and the only pity is that the necessary catalyst seemed to be the passing of the founders of the game.

Megadungeon Mini-Module: The Tavern

With all my thoughts on the modular megadungeon, I realized something recently while on the road. The best format to present my Cellars of the Castle Ruins adventure (an Upper Works and Level One compatible with Castle of the Mad Archmage) would be in modular segments.

Here is my first such segment. Players in any of my existing campaigns, of course, should not peek. Can we get a crowdsourced megadungeon going across the blogiverse? Talysman has taken the first step.

The main elements are a one-page format, a three-letter code, a map at 0.5 cm = 10 feet, a key to said map, and a small graphic that presents the shape of the module at 0.5 cm = 50 feet (this one is a 3 x 3 square). The small graphic is meant to be traced or cut out and fit into the larger-scale map of the megadungeon.

It's also helpful to have the exits mapped to the middle square of any given 50' edge, so the segments can fit with each other and the usual style of geomorph. Note also the blank line left to fill in your own megadungeon and campaign connections.

Anyway, let me know if you try your own hand at the megadungeon mini-module!

Megadungeon Connections

A well-constructed megadungeon gains depth - in the esthetic sense, not architectural sense - from the connections between rooms and levels - again, in the esthetic sense.

• The level in room 25 of level 2 opens the gateway in room 60 of level 4.
• The lizard men in area B of level 3 are entertaining a minotaur ambassador from the medusa on level 5
• The painting shows the dungeon's architect as a young man, battling serpents while a gleaming platinum is within reach.

Sometimes these connections, too, can inform the wider campaign world.

• You realize with a start that these are love letters implying a torrid affair between the current Bishop of Vorgrad and the Mother Superior of the local abbey.
• The book reveals a recipe for immortality, but it is not any herb or potion. Rather, it is the shocking heresy that the Gods were once mere mortals, who over long lives filled with heroic deeds accumulated enough virtu to ascend to the Outer Planes.

The challenge for the modular megadungeon is to take bits and pieces from this creator and that creator and integrate them into a whole that gratifies the players' need to feel like they're discovering things, clues and traces in space and time. Some reliable ideas:

The Downstream Lever: A control or trick or puzzle in one area, opens or closes or activates or releases something in another area.

The Historical District: This kennel ... and this kitchen ... and this library ... all belonged to the Demonic Chef of Avalino, and bear his marks and signs.

War: The inhabitants of one area are at war with the other, hold captives and loot, and fortify the border between them...

Peace: ... or due to diplomatic or trade relations between them, letters, gifts, and envoys from the others are to be found.

I'm not sure if any other ideas of this kind exist but if so, post 'em up.

At this point the question has to be asked: what does this mean for the designer of modular dungeon pieces? Do you leave levers up and put a few blank spaces for the megadungeon assembler to note down what the lever does? Or do you leave it up to them to pencil in little notes? I think any kind of module should encourage and help out good practice, so I'm going to have explicit "dangling hooks" in the dungeon, which the user can freely connect to other sections. Likewise for the secrets of the dungeon, the political area and indeed the whole universe. I'll tell you how big the secret is, you fill in what it is and what the clue might be.

The Graph Paper Architects

"One final enigma surrounding the architects of the Mythic Underworld: their complexes, catacombs, tombs, strongholds and hypogea were all built to more or less completely fill a 340 by 440 foot rectangle. Perhaps akin to the mining extravagance of their corridors built to a width of either 10 or 20 feet, it is clear that some strange concern with geomancy impelled the rigid proportion of their constructions."

One of many dungeon maps by Tim Hartin.

In the graph-paper shaped dungeon, after a while players figure out to look in corners for secret doors, and have a pretty good idea when they've explored the whole level. And yet so many megadungeons - even less ambitious adventures - are mapped this way. Castle of the Mad Archmage jams four sheets together for each level. Stonehell uses the one page dungeon template, a square about two-thirds the size of the standard graph paper, but otherwise does the same, and makes each square a stand-alone section. World's Largest Dungeon uses 16 blocky maps, each about twice as big as the standard graph paper but still uniformly rectangular.

Standard maps at first glance seem to solve more problems for the DM than the player. The DM doesn't need to wrestle with large or odd-sized pieces of paper. Players, though, don't know exactly where they enter on the graph paper, so even in the most orderly dungeons their maps will tend to go off the edge.

But in actual play, how much usefulness does the graph paper dungeon add? After all, the DM doesn't usually need to see all of the 440 x 340 foot area - only the immediate area of 5-10 rooms is useful to a session of play.

This argues for the modular megadungeon to be portioned out in smaller sections, such as Talysman recently demonstrates. The overall strategic map can then be as irregular as it wants to be. In fact, the fitting together of the modules in a whole ten-level dungeon can be easily mapped on a 1 square to 100' scale, where each section, approximately 7x7 or 6x8 squares, is a separate level.

A related issue on a smaller scale is the way of dungeon geomorphs, as cool as they are, to create an overly dense and connected "wallpaper" of rooms and passages. The standard format seems to be a 10' x 10' square with exits in the middle of each 5' length of side, 8 in all.  This has been the aesthetic barrier to my using geomorphs, up until now.

One solution would be to just arbitrarily say that 1 in 3 geomorph squares is blank. You deal them face-down from your stack on a d6 roll of 1 or 2, and erase or block off the connecting doors and passages.

Another idea is ... well, I'll show you what I mean next time.

The Meaningful Megadungeon

The original megadungeon, Greyhawk Castle, was devised for a rolling playgroup that met over many long evenings and weekends. Addicted to the thrill of a new style of gaming, that group could cover pages and pages of graph paper, forge characters in the heat of unforgiving death, and over years reach the highest levels and the lowest.

Today's gamers rarely have time for such foolishness. Jobs, kids, life in general keep us to one session a week if we're lucky, though more often expect twice a month.

Will your party explore the whole of whatever megadungeon you've created? Almost certainly not. But more important is the knowledge that they could go off in many different directions; that the whole living breathing potential sprawl of the place is there around them.

To achieve this feeling, and the feeling of meaningful exploration, the dungeon must be more than an infinitely repeating wallpaper of passages, rooms and random filler. Three desirable things:

1. The sub-areas of the dungeon must show differences in design (wide passages, narrow passages, orthogonal, diagonal, curved, irregular, etc.) and decoration.

2. The areas of the dungeon should relate a meaningful history for the players to discover. This can happen on a micro level - "this was once the kitchen of the Minotaur Lord but now it is the lab of a crazed alchemist" - and a macro level - evidence related to what the Minotaur Lord was doing, how he got on with the other power groups, what his place was in the rationale of the dungeon.

3. The areas of the dungeon should refer to each other, both in terms of architecture (a multiplicity of stairs, chutes, teleporters giving the sense of freedom of movement between safer and more dangerous places) and features ("this lever opens the portcullis on level 3"..."in this room is an ambassador from the troglodytes on level 4").

Now, life is short not just for players but GMs as well. The temptation is to make it up as one goes along, but this risks missing out on the epic sweep and overarching plan implied in criteria 2 and 3. Recently, JDJarvis over at Aeons and Auguries has suggested a modular, crowdsourced approach, in which people contribute individual sections but the exact geographical connection between them is up to the individual GM. I like this, because it takes a lot of the burden of effort from the individual GM while still allowing creative input and personalization. But question number 2 and 3 remain - how to convey an overarching theme and plot?

Next post I'll address this issue, explain why I can't stand geomorphs, and offer a better solution.