The quixotic quest to build a D&D 5e megadungeon: level one, part one

Level one of the Castle Druidun megadungeon!

If I knew how much work it would be to make a real megadungeon, which is almost as much work as writing a book, I probably would never have started. How far drive will compel me is an open question.

I've got 3 levels of the castle fleshed out, and 2 levels of the dungeon populated. Advice on The Internet recommends every room have at least 3 different points of interest in every room. Ugh. Considering that each level of Druidun has roughly 100 rooms, that's 300 items of interest. Keeping that interesting and varied has been... challenging. 

I started burning out on level 2. 

A decent megadungeon should have at least 10. 

Yikes.

On the positive side, players advance in level much, MUCH faster than they ever used to. From 1,500 to 2,500 points for 2nd level in AD&D to just 300 points in 5e. 

Since in the traditional megadungeon each level is pegged to the players level (3rd level of the dungeon is meant for 3rd level players), that means... the dungeon is WAY too big. To get enough experience to advance to the next level, in 5e the players may only need to clear 1/4 of Druidun! 

Maybe less.

I've had to go back and raise the lethality of the challenges players face in areas they haven't entered yet. They've already got enough XP for 3rd level. And hell yes, I'm making them go back to town and train with a mentor, as is right and proper to do, to advance in levels. Take that, 5e simplicity and streamlining!

The first Random Encounter list I did up for Druidun was filled with NPC characters and social interactions. I didn't roll often enough for encounters, ultimately only presented players with one. The other encounters seemed like the NPCs would just get grilled endlessly by the players for information which I didn't have, which would trigger paranoia and increasing demands ("Why aren't they telling us? Let's force them!"), which would be exhausting, so I dropped it and didn't bother. 

Instead, I've made monster combo encounters, of giant scorpions and kobolds, for example, that might present more interesting tactical challenges.

The first level of the dungeon is divided into different themed sections: the ancient druid tunnels are in the north west (tombs and catacombs), the halls of King Eomel in the north (dining rooms, treasure display vaults, arenas), a more recent goblin warren in the north east, the prison and formal dungeon in the east (naturally), and the dwarven mines to the south, including workshops, refineries, and furnaces. 

All of these areas have long since been overrun (in some cases multiple times) but other factions and monsters, hopefully giving the space a rich history that will be figured out by the players as they progress. 

The Eldritch Veil wizards ran sinister and forbidden magical experiments on level 1 of the dungeon (some of which are still going, even after their forced departure) and particularly in the castle itself (levels 1-3, probably extending on to level 4). Level five of the castle now is dominated by a colony of giant wasps. 

The necromancer has built his lair in the west of level 1, extending the original druid complex with fresh chambers dedicated to the God of Death, Nergul. 

The whole place has then been criss-crossed by the tunnels dug by monsters like ankhegs, umber hulks, goblins, giant ants and the like, connecting areas that would otherwise be far more defensible and offering players the opportunity to bypass dangerous sections. It also allows multiple ways to enter and leave the complex. Like water pouring into the pit on Oak Island, you can never really be sure you've cleared Druidun; the monster tide keeps pouring in. 

Each staircase is aligned to the level above it in the castle. There are notes and hints for the DM on the map, which is purely functional and not meant to be seen by the players. I can't begin to imagine the amount of work a painted player map would take. 

DM Journal 2: The adventure begins!

Ouch.

The first full adventure took the players to the ruins of Druidun Castle and the warren of tunnels beneath. 

It’s taken a year to cover just a couple days in game time, the reverse of the Narnia effect. Ah, adulthood!

Their goal? To rescue the son of the Baron of Forksbury from the necromancer’s clutches before he's sacrificed on the Blood Moon. All part of Ol' Necro's plans to bring back an undead big bad (Luthius) to the mortal plane. 

In hindsight, this is probably an adventure for a higher level group, and I should have kept things smaller, but that ship has long since sailed. 

I wanted a megadungeon!

The team (which I've nicknamed Shanghai Knights) consists of: 

• A fighter and aspiring knight from a minor noble house. This player has a LOT of experience and plays a level or two above his actual rank, if not higher. He wants to recover a lost family sword that belonged to his great grandfather, Henry Allister, whose tale will be covered later.

• A gnome rogue who's a member of a thieves guild, and is out to avenge her murdered kin. The minions of the black ichor got them; it's a necrotic poison that's infesting the earth, flora and fauna in Pelshire, and Druidun is the centre of the infection. As per the necromancer's plan, it's being jazzed by the dimensional fissure (opened up by the Eldritch Veil wizards) deep beneath the castle. 

• A melon growing cleric who hates lizard men (Anti-lizardite?) and likes writing his name in blood in forbidden books of dark magic. Sometimes armed with a +1 ham hock.

• A peripatetic elf wizard who's come from afar and wants to reclaim lost books, chew bubble gum, and basically murder everyone she meets.

The group works well together and has proved highly effective in combat, although they tend not to follow best practice firing projectiles when a comrade is in front of the target, and frequently rolling natural '1's. This has led to unfortunate near deaths from friendly fire, which has been highly amusing. 

They started out casting light on a bush on the road into the castle, so they could see who's coming and going. The magic glowing bush put The Night Cart crew (a bunch of acolytes, zombies and skeletons hauling bodies from the local graveyard into the castle) on edge, and when the characters (in heavy armour) tried to skulk closer, their clanking gave them away. I nerfed the convoy a bit as I didn't want to TPK before they even got to the dungeon. Might not have been necessary as I rolled badly and the game isn't as lethal as it used to be. 

After butchering the cart convoy, the Shanghai Knights got into the castle through a drainage gate using, appropriately enough, the 'Shanghai Knights' trick; they then set upon the bandit gang in the crumbling castle gatehouse from behind, and the thieves were all dead before I could blink. 

After a quick exploration of the grounds, and burning some buildings down because noises, they reached the keep; I hadn’t filled out every room in the first floor of the castle, figuring it should be fine to have a few bare ones, but a player started getting bored after 2 empty rooms. That didn't take long, so I threw some skeletons and armoured zombies at them. Then I stocked up those same rooms with baddies and interest points, which they can encounter on their way out. 

Play and learn.

I’ve tried to keep to the ‘Rule of Three’ where there are three items/interactions of interest per room/location, but the scope of the megadungeon made that problematic: the first level has over 100 rooms, the second almost as many, and there are 20-40 locations on each floor of the castle. 

Why did I want to make a megadungeon again?

For childhood dreams and the creative challenge, of course, but after dozens and dozens of rooms, my brain started to run bare. The upper castle rooms have the least detail, because I started with the dungeon. 

I should have gradually ramped up to a megadungeon. Ah well. More learning.

I figure I can put it up on line here, and bits of it may prove useful for others, either as material to pillage or a guide on what not to do. 

We'll see how far I get.

Third, fourth and fifth levels of Castle Druidun

3rd floor map includes the catwalks around the outer walls and the balcony of the Great Hall

4th floor map includes the top floors of the outer towers and the upper level library and study.

5th floor map includes the giant wasp nests that have overrun the eastern halve of the keep

2nd floor of Castle Druidun megadungeon

2nd floor of Druidun Castle

NOTE: I figure the maps of the castle are probably of more interest than the room content, so I'll just be posting floors 2-5 of the upper structure. I didn't bother numbering the outer tower upper levels; there are some notes on inhabitants in the 1st floor annotations. The east barbican tower roof and floors have collapsed, exposing the area to the elements.

Dragon Garage review at Atomic Junk Shop

Always keep well stocked with toilet paper in The Aftertime

The great Greg Burgas over at Atomic Junk Shop has a fab review up of Dragon Garage.

The bottom line:

"Dragon Garage isn’t quite as good as Turner’s best work, but it’s still pretty good. The art is impressive, not only because of how Turner usually creates his art, but just on an interesting, technical level as well, and the story is quite fun with a nice amount of seriousness thrown in. It’s not quite a crazy as some of Turner’s works, but it’s a very good addition to his bibliography."

Check the full review out here.

DM Journal 1: Jumping from AD&D to 5e

"Do you have a moment? I have a brief survey for you to complete."

I’ve been ‘running’ the D&D campaign as game master for almost a year now. I hadn’t game mastered since high school, or even played, other than a few one shots over the years. I think they were version 3 or 4? Can’t remember, we used pre-generated characters and I didn’t get into the rules. 

So what’s it like leaping straight from AD&D to D&D 5e? It’s hard to say exactly, because it’s been so long since I played but the impressions I have are:

• The game is still spread across three core books: Dungeon Master Guide, Player’s Handbook, and Monster Manual, and I still kinda hate it. To do most things, you have to refer to multiple books. You need weapons stats from Players, monster stats from Monster, but you have to get the Player’s out to find out what the monster’s spells do. I wind up using my phone to look stuff up a lot, it’s faster. Since the web is not space constrained, why not just put the relevant spell stats right there with the monster? (I’ve tried to do this with my own mega dungeon)

• Gameplay has become a LOT more streamlined. Those early AD&D books looked like physics texts, with endless tables, percentages and glossaries galore. The new books are more friendly looking, spaciously laid out, and while there are still a good number of tables (and a lot to learn), the basic rules are far simpler and more organized. So simpler surface, but still a lot of depth.

• Characters in AD&D started out much more limited than 5e. For example, in AD&D, a first level magic-users got one spell, and that was it. You fire your magic missiles, or whatever, and you were done for the day. The rest of the time you’d have to hide your 1 hit point body behind the nearest fighter and just try not to die, because a strong breeze could kill you. Now? All magic users get cantrips, which they can use endlessly. I do remember cantrips being introduced in AD&D, but they were little more than parlour tricks, not bolts of flame that could incinerate people. Hell, even rogues (thieves and assassins are no longer a thing, too judgemental I guess). 

• Characters in 5e are much more robust and resilient than in AD&D. Ability score minimums prevent you from running hopeless characters; before minimums were just a house rule. Everyone is now above average. Healing happens faster and a long rest brings you right back up to your maximum hit points. Short rests recover a couple of hit die, so having a healer as part of a party is not as crucial as it used to be. You also get multiple saving throws after reaching 0 hit points to not die. 

• Dungeon crawls and mega dungeons are practically unheard of in 5e; they were bread and butter with AD&D. 

• The number of classes and races players can choose from is vastly expanded. Whether you like this or not depends on the kind of fantasy setting you want to use. I prefer a more limited set, as the game was meant to be set in the world of Dragon Garage.

• First level monsters mostly have 2 hit die rather than the old 1 hit die. They're tougher to better match the more capable 1st level modern character.

• Monsters all have ability scores now, they never used to.

• There's no To Hit table that goes by player level or monster hit die.

• Armour Class is reversed, with 20 being great and 0 being terrible. In AD&D, AC 10 was an unarmored new born babe and -10 was practically invulnerable.

• The advantage/disadvantage system didn’t exist in AD&D; it’s elegant, simple and I like it in 5e. 

• Monsters now come with assigned weapons. This feels really weird, but I understand it for the sake of flow and simplification; I swap weapons out if I feel like it.

• Characters advance in levels a LOT faster than before: in AD&D it could take 1,500 to 3,500 XP to reach 2nd level; now it’s a uniform 300 points! Punch a couple goblins and you’re second level. I don’t mind this, as 1st level characters are so fragile we died like flies back in The Before Time.

Ultimately, 5e is a lot more forgiving, and less deadly, than AD&D.

I wasn't really aware of this when I started, which led me to make early encounters much easier for the party than they should have been. I was pitching at AD&D difficulty for 1st level, rather than 5e. The result is that the players steam rolled through the first adventure, The Tomb of Aethelwulf, even though I was bumping up and strengthening the baddies as we went. It just was never enough.

The final boss fell a little flat (in my opinion), with the necromancer forced into a hasty retreat by the hard charging fighter. A barrage of missile attacks (both magical cantrips and non-magical arrows) made it impossible for him to hold focus. It didn’t help that I deliberately didn’t pick the deadliest spell collection (again, still thinking of player fragility). 

That mini-dungeon adventure took 2.5 sessions; the remainder of the third was spent in town threatening to murder the NPC I had set up to be their fence for treasure and magical goods. The complications from this will be fun to play out, for while the wheels of justice turn slowly in Pelshire, they do turn. Nothing that a pot of gold can’t solve, though.

I’m still trying to get a handle on player expectations for 5e. Their experience with the game is completely different from mine, and I don’t have a really good idea of how the game is now played. I just know the game we are playing isn’t what they’re used to, and I’m curious what the heck their usual game sessions are like. I gather they are more story focused, rather than exploration with a story running in the background. 

I’m basically running an AD&D megadungeon crawl (also no longer done) using D&D 5e rules.

 

I did try and inject some motivation in the beginning: each character got 3 ‘story cards’ at the outset, and chose their favourite; they each have a bit of background with a story hook tied to the megadungeon, such as a lost family artifact (which will make them the legitimate leader of the family house) buried deep in Druidun, or a missing relative, or an evil sibling rival, or what have you. 

First session, they started at a tavern (naturally) and were interrupted by a couple of villagers fleeing Aethelwulf’s tomb, where their coworkers had been captured by an evil necromancer’s crew. 

For the next adventure, they were given a mission by a medieval fixer/talent agent… whom they immediately betrayed, going behind his back to cut out the middle man. He's not going to be giving them any more missions. My NPC set ups are 0 for 2. 

The only ‘person’ the team has bonded with (and not threatened to kill, behead, mutilate, torture or worse) is a decapitated talking head the necromancer left in their path to intimidate them. Now the head’s hanging from the cleric’s belt. Every now and then they un-gag him to listen to threats of death and dismemberment. 

That’s probably why they like him.