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| The one, the only... of many iterations now |
The Winged Adventure
I have been intrigued by the Castle Greyhawk dungeon since I was a kid. It lives on in my memory as a legendary, ideal dungeon. I never played it, but people talked about it in hushed words.
But I don’t think it ever existed.
Not as a fully fleshed out, annotated place.
The longer I work at the mega-dungeon, and the longer my campaign goes on, the more I believe Gygax created a lot of the dungeon on the fly, from barely annotated maps, rough scribbled notes, and on the spot inspiration based on interaction with the players.
I don’t think the process of a published adventure is the same as the one for a mega-dungeon. My gut tells me that the mega-dungeon is far more fungible, more adaptive, and more ad hoc. It’s in the moment. It’s a living thing, a morphing meme that changes every time you look at it.
If Gygax had tape recorded the sessions, we might have a solid record of what the player’s experienced.
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| The Greyhawk campaign setting, including magnificent map, was developed over time by Gygax and his players. The box set was the most in-depth world building I'd ever seen outside Tolkien. |
But my gut tells me that the Greyhawk Dungeon lived in those sessions. Even Gygax probably can’t remember everything that happened, and I doubt he wrote down everything after.
There have been some adaptions of the dungeon, including a joke one that doesn’t sound at all like what I’d heard the dungeon was really like.
Later in life, Gygax (as I understand it), revisited the mega-dungeon, but I’ve not purchased or seen any of these products, which he had to do under another game license.
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| A shambling mound... why, what a good idea! |
Pilfer the Ancestors
Gygax inevitably leads to plundering the idealized ancestors.
It’s also very much in keeping with the tomb raider aspect of D&D: plunder the work of those who came before!
There’s 50 years worth of amazing, imaginative, incredible dungeon design already out there! Ideas for monsters, treasures, traps, adventures, threats, rewards, the works. I read it and think, damn, why couldn’t I think of that? Or worse, I thought I thought of that, but actually someone thought of that decades before I did! This is ever the hazard of fantasy fiction.
It will happen to you, sooner or later. Don’t be too hard on yourself when it does. Millions of people have played the game over the decades, this is a well trodden space, and overlap is inevitable. Think of it more as great minds think alike.
Initially, when I started my dungeon, I didn’t want to use any online material. I wanted it to be purely my imagination… although my imagination was heavily influenced by what I had experienced as a kid, and I took from that, consciously or otherwise. That’s inevitable. We are the sum of our experiences and what we extrapolate from them.
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| One of my favourite parts of the old Dragon Magazine: Phil & Dixie! |
Fantasy is a great big mish mash of tropes, more so than sci-fi is. Dragons, dungeons, elves, orcs and so on inhabit an awful lot of fantasy stories.
The up side? There’s a lot of material you can shoe horn into your fantasy world without any revision. Most of the time, orcs are orcs, dragons are dragons and dwarves are ornery, drunken workaholics.
The more rooms I did, the harder it got. I’d say after the first 100 rooms I was really running dry and I started looking for inspiration. I’ve now reached level three of the mega dungeon and… even pilfering, reskinning and repurposing, I’ve run out of steam.
My original intention was to have an entirely unique, original megadungeon. Easy, breezy, I thought. I’ve written graphic novels and 100,000+ word prose novels. I could do this! How hard could it be?
Turns out: plenty hard!!!
I went too big. Now, I am contemplating incorporating elements from other dungeons wholesale.
Fortunately, I have a big buffer built and we aren’t playing that often anymore. Hell, we may never get through what I’ve built so far (such is the power of my OCD autism).
So… I will wait until my creative tanks refill before tackling level four.
One thing this project has done is increase the respect I have for anyone who actually has completed a true mega-dungeon.
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| "Didn't I see you in the last dozen Fantasy Worlds?" |
I will continue to post missives from my subterranean creative journey as they occur.
Next: Good question. Formatting your masterpiece, perhaps?
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| The immortal Finieous Fingers and his always relevant door protocol advice |
