This is an overview of the megadungeon I’ve been working on (and off) for a couple years, now. I’m hoping that by writing out a status report of some sort, I can gain some more focus on how I want to continue developing the dungeon.
The dungeon currently has 225 rooms total, across ten different sections, and three levels deep. All of the rooms are keyed to some degree, although some only have the faintest hints of a key, such as “feature”, or “monster + hidden treasure”. (As I write this post, I’m in the process of writing a new section, with ~20 more rooms.)
There’s seven notable NPCs, and four notable creatures. Of course, a few of these can easily switch between which of the two categories they fall in, depending entirely on how the players respond to them. To a party of murderhobos, everything is a monster just waiting to be killed. I haven’t put much thought in balancing the difficulty of each section, because it’s all just a sandbox. Encounters are rarely pure combat, retreat is typically an option, and there’s no accounting for creative solutions to interesting problems.
A lot of the dungeon started out as randomly generated. This is especially noticeable in some of the more “funhouse” style sections of the dungeon, but even some of the more themed sections still show signs of randomness. Not everything needs to make sense, of course, but absolute chaos is just indecipherable noise. There’s a lot that needs to be smoothed out. That said, if anyone is out to make their own megadungeon, I strongly recommend relying heavily on random tables to generate a lot of content fast. You can always go back later to revise what doesn’t work. Sometimes patterns can emerge from randomness, and those can be used to develop more interesting ideas. Through combining various resources over the years, I feel like I’ve developed an approach to using tables that grants me the right amount of creative flexibility to keep things interesting.
Every megadungeon needs an underground waterway system that extends off the map indefinitely. That’s basically the universal connector that allows all megadungeons to be combined with each other. Mine has an underground river. At my table, this would connect to both Stonehell and Dyson’s Delve.
That’s all I can think of for now. That’s a pretty decent overview of the state of development. At some point, I’ll have to write up more posts about all the various interesting bits within the dungeon.