Confession time – I’ve never been a big fan of mega-dungeons.

I think this is more due to my typical game play style than anything else. Most of the original adventures run and played by my own long-time gaming group simply don’t fit the mega-dungeon format. Our adventures tended to prominently feature roleplaying and investigation, with a smattering of combat here and there. If anything, a typical adventure session of my group has aptly been described as a sword-and-sorcery version of “The A-Team” – receive a mission, come up with a ridiculously elaborate plan to combat the enemy, and then fight the enemy in one big battle. (The ridiculously elaborate plan rarely survives initial contact with the enemy, but that’s neither here nor there.) Sustained, small encounters didn’t fit the style of our group … nor did adventures taking place at a single location. Our characters were the original group of well-armed mercenary hobos, going from place to place in search of adventure, never stopping at any particular location for more than a gaming session or two.

As you’ll see later, it’s a style that doesn’t always lend itself well to a good mega-dungeon format.

That being said, mega-dungeons always fascinated me. They fascinate a lot of gamers. If you’re a longtime gaming grognard (like myself), I think the legend of Castle Greyhawk has a lot to do with that. Castle Greyhawk was undeniably the original mega-dungeon, and the late Gary Gygax wrote and spoke about it frequently in the early editorials of Dragon Magazine and other places, as did the other TSR folks who played in Gary’s original D&D campaigns. It always sounded awesome – bigger (literally!) and better than any other adventure. The fact that Gary kept talking about finally publishing it someday – but never getting around to it – also helped to build its mythical status as something grand, as anticipation built up steadily for it for years and years, with gamers wanting to finally get a glimpse of one of Gary’s greatest creations.

(Sadly, that never came to fruition; hints of what was and could’ve been only came through the wretched abomination known as the module WG7: Castle Greyhawk; the much-better modules EX1: Dungeonland, EX2: The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and WG6: Isle of the Ape, which showcased some of the extraplanar levels of the Castle; the much-later Greyhawk Ruins and the much-much-later Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, which finally started to assemble some of Gary’s original scattered ideas for Castle Greyhawk into a consolidated format, but written by different authors; and finally, Castle Zagyg, which was finally the Gary Gygax-penned iteration of Castle Greyhawk everyone had always hoped to see … but it unfortunately was not fully completed before he passed away.)

And even if the legend of Castle Greyhawk was something that never piqued your interest as a gamer … there’s something about the mega-dungeon concept that’s just damn cool. Tackling a mega-dungeon is a challenge; conquering it is just awesome. The sheer size and scale of the mega-dungeon usually means that the player characters have to do far more to survive and be successful than they would in standard dungeons, meaning that the rewards – and the sense of accomplishment – of beating one is all the sweeter.

I recently began work on a “Lost City” mega-adventure that would’ve essentially been a mega-dungeon. Though this project sadly has been shelved (and I don’t expect it to see the light of day again), it did provide me the opportunity to sit down, look at a bunch of mega-dungeons and mega-adventures, and see what made them work or not work. The better ones, I think, all shared a few common themes. Here they are:

1. Big adventure, big picture, big story. The mega-dungeons that are essentially nothing more than ninety-thousand rooms filled with monsters, traps, and treasure do nothing for me. The adventure’s big, so the stakes need to be big. There needs to be compelling reasons for the characters to be tackling the adventure. The better ones have both small, short-term goals and larger “big-picture” goals for the characters to achieve. (And, ideally, some of these goals are completely unrelated – see the next point and you’ll understand.) But a big hook towards keeping the players’ interest will probably eventually be on the endgame for the mega-adventure – ending the prophecy, killing the big dragon, finding the lost artifact, or whatever else becomes the thing that makes your players go: OH HELL YES, I WANT TO DO THAT.

2. Escape is a healthy thing. The mega-adventure or mega-dungeon means you’re in the same place for a really, really long time. In my experience, that means players invariably get bored, no matter how exciting the adventure might be. You can mix things up a bit by throwing in some unrelated plot threads in your mega-dungeon, but sometimes players will just get sick of the place. Having a nearby town where the players can refresh themselves, reload, and have some different sorts of adventures is a good idea, so make sure the characters can leave the mega-dungeon without too much difficulty. (Portals to other places within the dungeon aren’t a bad idea either, provided your gaming style lends itself to that sort of wackiness.)

3. Payback’s a bitch. In my old campaigns, the incessant wandering of the heroes from place to place meant there were rarely repercussions for their actions. They never got to see that slaying the kobold tribe near the village meant that they’d effectively ended a decades-old war between the kobolds and the orcs, and that the orcs now could focus their hostility directly on the village the characters thought they had “saved”. In the mega-dungeon, because so much happens in essentially the same place, you can have fallout like that from the players’ actions. It’s easier to have recurring villains with long memories and axes to grind. The mega-dungeon’s a more living environment, where even the simplest of actions might mean dire things down the road.

4. Overall holistic design. Living environment also applies to the guys writing and designing the mega-dungeon as well. The place as a whole needs to make sense. How do the various denizens of the place get along? Are there groups of allies or sworn enemies? Also, keep in mind that stuff found in one part of the adventure could affect something else down the road, often to a great extent. That “invincible” frost giant jarl at the end of the adventure won’t be so tough if the characters loaded up on all the fire-based magic items you loaded into the beginning of the adventure.

5. No chokepoints. There better not be a point in the dungeon that the players hit where they are faced with “solve this/defeat this OR ELSE YOU CANNOT GET ANY FURTHER IN THE DUNGEON”. Should they fail, nothing sucks worse than this. Absolutes should not be a part of any dungeon, but their problems get magnified in a mega-dungeon.

6. Indexing and organization. There’s a hell of a lot going on in a mega-dungeon. Knowing that the key on the third level opens the chest on the ninth might be important, and being able to quickly look up that sort of information is extremely helpful. While an index is perfect for these sorts of situations, just organizing the adventure to cover those situations is very, very helpful. This gets back to holistic design – if the demon lord on the thirteenth level of the dungeon is badly affected by a magic sword found on level six, putting a page reference number to the stats for that magic sword in the demon lord encounter is a great idea.

Of all the mega-dungeons and mega-adventures I read over the past year, three stood out above and beyond the rest to me. Castle Whiterock, hands down, I consider to be the best of them. Maure Castle is also excellent (and possibly the closest thing we’ll ever see to a complete old-school Gygax-styled mega-dungeon), as well as the original Caverns of Thracia (odd to call it a mega-dungeon, as it’s just 80 pages, but author Paul Jaquays created something really cool, original … and open. There’s no right way to explore the Caverns, no great big villains or set pieces, but it really works great nonetheless).

Your favorite mega-dungeons? Your experiences with them?

I’d love to hear about them.