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| Is that a big dungeon, or is that a megadungeon? |
Alas, it withered.
Well. It's on a temporary hiatus. Pining, I swear!
Turns out, funny thing, that megadungeons are an awful of work. Kind of inherent in the 'mega' part of the name, which I should have paid more attention to. Far more work than I'd initially thought it'd be. Now I'm well in and the only way out is through.
Or, of course, I could just walk away.
But no! The sane, rational thing to do is not an option!
I shall push on, and one day finish (a truncated) megadungeon! Maybe it will be the first half... or first third, or perhaps a quarter... of the megadungeon. Other people do that. Reputable people like the makers of Stonehell, for example. It's well regarded as a professional creation, and was done in two parts. Precedent!
But what, you may ask, have I learned in my egomaniacal nerd quest to create a sprawling megadungeon? Well dear reader, the first hundred rooms are a relative breeze. After that, you start tearing your brain out.
I tackled the first level of the castle, quite logically, first, then the first level of the dungeon. So far so good, right? Easy breezy! However, the first dungeon level had almost a hundred rooms, and the castle about 50-60 (including towers). It honestly started getting difficult around fifty.
A little (months) later, I tackled the second level(s).
It got slower and more discombobulating. In desperation I began casting around for inspiration, any inspiration. Another long gap, then keyed some rooms in the castle. Finally, the layout of the third dungeon level, including 3 panopticons. I even keyed a couple rooms on the third level. That was like pulling straws out of my brain.
I should probably note here I planned on 10 levels.
Then... crickets.
Followed by more crickets. Crickets breeding, founding civilizations, discovering writing, going to the opera, inventing space travel, you get the picture (I admit I am somewhat curious what cricket opera was like, I may never know they evolved into beings of pure light and left for Andromeda).
I decided to take a break before brain burnt out. I took a look at old Dungeon magazine issues (well, skimmed. Okay, I looked at the index), Polygon, Dragon Magazine, old modules, online DM pundits and gurus, the works.
My new approach is to try and key like Stonehell. Why? Because it's hella more succinct than what nonsense I was doing. That didn't quite turn out; being that succinct is even more work.
So now I've been building up room descriptions and ideas that I can use to guide creation of level four.
For level three... there's this awesome idea I had (found on someone else's blog): in a megadungeon, not everything has to have something in it. You CAN have blank rooms. No 'rule of three', no pulling desperate details out of a bodily orifice, nothing. Just big, glorious, empty rooms. Frankly, the megadungeon needs them. There have to be 'highways' that are frequently traversed and as a result are not inhabited. Maybe scat, fungus mounds, murals, looted corpses, that sort of thing. But nothing brain wracking.
In fact, I think I probably should have overridden the whole 'rule of three' idea earlier. I'm not making a rocket for NASA. Or Eloi Elon. I can use some random generation tables for meaningless detail. Or rather, detail the players can do the work of projecting meaning onto. I'm gonna outsource, it's what all the hip corporate powers do.
Looks like there was a burst of interest in megadungeons... like 6 years ago. That's when a scad of links about megadungeons went dark. I'm always behind the curve. Fortunately, completing the megadungeon will take so long, it'll be back in fashion by the time I do!
Next post: All the megadungeon advice I found on the internets that i remembered to bookmark!
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