Adam Koebel recently shared an article about Megadungeons and I have to admit they are my greatest challenge as a GM.

Adam Koebel recently shared an article about Megadungeons and I have to admit they are my greatest challenge as a GM.

Adam Koebel recently shared an article about Megadungeons and I have to admit they are my greatest challenge as a GM. I never know how to deal with the scale and how to make it interesting and engaging for players to explore an seemingly infinite dungeon. How to you make sections/rooms interesting and varied specially when you have to leave blanks

I when I get overwhelmed with a dungeon I usually hint an easy exit. I’d like to conquer this sentiment but I have no idea where to start. Any tips, articles, books etc.

11 thoughts on “Adam Koebel recently shared an article about Megadungeons and I have to admit they are my greatest challenge as a GM.”

  2. I don’t see a distinction. A big, vast, ever-evolving campaign above-ground world seems to be just like, or even larger than, any megadungeon might be. It essence, it seems like the same thing. Might it help to just treat the dungeon as the world itself?

    I think you could find just as many fascinating things in an underground world as you could in an above ground one. Maybe you even find another world under your current one, or you dug your way to the other side of your world. 

  4. Something to try with building dungeons with the base layout I need to try (should work with all the time i spent with it; great thing while listening to podcasts) is a rather cheap game on Steam called Dungeons of Dredmor. It’s a rather simple RPG with humor & a random layout to how it does rooms & connecting them. Then it’s just have some lists on who is using it or used it & for what purpose.

  5. If anything, I’m in favor of more microdungeons.  With megadungeons, it seems like knowing when to zoom in and go room-by-room and when to zoom out and go area-to-area is key.

  7. What Johnstone Metzger  said. I can’t +1 it enough. The only thing I’ll add is those mini dungeons should probably have some sort of connecting tissue to them. For instance: There’s a mountain range that was once home to a fierce dragon but that dragon disappeared 50 years ago. Now adventurers coming looking to see what happened to the lost treasure horde of the dragon. When they get to the mountains they find a town at the base of it filled with other adventurers thinking the same thing, a town which profits off these adventurers, large portions of the mountains have been hollowed out by something which can melt stone, and terrible things keep coming to these mountains and taking up residence within them. Now you can answer all the questions for said location and use different area’s of the mountains as mini-dungeons. You could have one area where there is a fungal forest and a wizard/druid guy doing experiments with fungus. You could have a tribe of kobolds who would rather bargain with adventurers for cloth and candy than fight them, you could have… well, pretty much anything and then just ask yourself how does this connect to what happened or is up with the Dragon and it’s horde and why is this place like this?

  11. Ran a megadungeon style campaign once for some people back when I was in the military. I used a lot of the same general concepts for the underground realms as I use for the surface; there were communities of intelligent creatures, untamed areas with monstrous creatures, wars being faught between factions vying for limited resources, ruins of the ancient powers etc.

    One of the things that really worked was making sure there were occasional “bases” from which the heroes could operate out of for a while; I used a dwarven mine, a gnome city, the personal feifdom of a lich, and an area that many adventurers used as “base camp” before tackling the deepest areas. Each area became central to a series of adventures and intrigues before events sent them on their way. 

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