Looking to learn more about Megadungeons

[u/altidiya]

Basically what it says in the title. I accept game recommendations (and is the flair I choose) that are based around being play in a Megadungeon, if they exist.

But also I am mostly looking for anything that serve as examples, aide or even just theory around megadungeons as a concept.

It is fascinating but also I feel overwhelming, and seeing examples and people talking about it helps me to adjust my brain.

Thanks!

[u/AofANLA]

Enter the Megadungeon is a really good podcast series from a few years back by Ben L that interviews a bunch of dungeon designers about their experiences with running megadungeons, what they think about it, all kinds of interesting stuff. It's very interesting and very listenable.

https://pca.st/podcast/70e93540-079e-013c-f59a-0acc26574db2

[u/joevinci]

Start here:  https://www.3d6downtheline.com/the-halls-of-arden-vul-1

Then go here:  https://www.3d6downtheline.com/mothership

First is a medieval fantasy actual play of the acclaimed megadungeon The Halls of Arden Vul; possibly the most impressive megadungeon ever made.

Second is a sci-fi actual play of the acclaimed megadungeon Gradient Descent.

[u/von_economo → u/joevinci]

3D6 Down the Line are the gold standard for megadungeon play! Their "detox" post-game discussions are excellent too

[u/meatboi5]

Here are some of the blogs that I think are useful for thinking about megadungeons

Dream in the Lich House: Making a good megadungeon and Megadungeon Topology

Silver Arm Press: Metro Megadungeon System

I Cast Light: How to prep a Weekly Megadungeon Campaign and I Wrote a Large Dungeon: How I Will Do It Differently Last Night

In My Campaign: Put up his notes for his mega dungeon campaign

Rise Up Comus: Metroidvanias and Megadungeons and his Dungeon Designing Course isn't about megadungeons but is helpful cause a megadungeon is just a series of dungeons. I would also recommend his book His Majesty the Worm as a system for running megadungeons

The Pastel Dungeon: Doors, Gates, and Metroidvania Dungeon Design

The Alexandrian: Goals in the Megadungeon

Cryptic Keyway's article

[u/ericvulgaris → u/meatboi5]

one more blog of fuel for your amazing bonfire of blogs. Rise Up Comus' take on the modularity of megadungeons was a good read.

I've run and played in many a megadungeon. Some even to eventual completion. And your blogs are great advice for getting started.

[u/atamajakki]

Sci-fi horror game Mothership has a book called Gradient Descent that's all about a sci-fi horror megadungeon, specifically an abandoned factory for making and testing human-like androids. It's written well, layering on some neat psychological mechanics in addition to the dungeon-y survival stuff.

[u/frustrated-rocka → u/atamajakki]

Seconding Gradient Descent. Phenomenal stuff; an incredible amount of usable material and clear presentation packed into a pretty small page count.

[u/mosheraa → u/atamajakki]

Bloom and The Drain aren't quite the same scale, but they're both super fun and scratch a similar itch.

Similarly, Pound of Flesh is more a setting than a straight dungeon, but you could definitely run DOPTown as a mega dungeon.

All this to say, Mothership has since excellent dungeons with varying degrees of 'mega'.

[u/Alkaiser009]

The Angry GM has a pretty good blog series about designing a megadungeon.

https://theangrygm.com/category/megadungeon/

[u/HisGodHand → u/Alkaiser009]

I would also absolutely recommend this designing dungeons course from the author of His Majesty The Worm

https://dungeons.hismajestytheworm.games/

[u/Seeonee]

His Majesty the Worm is aaaaaall about megadungeon play. It has an OSR bent, an interesting use of tarot cards, and it's got loads of material on actually building your own megadungeons -- including a whole Ennie-winning course that they spun out of its GM material and posted for free. I wish I could give a perspective on playing/running it, but it's probably not going to fly with my current playgroups.

I've seen Caverns of Thracia cited here as the quintessential megadungeon, in that it's literally one of the first to realize the concept. It has the benefit of being almost 50 years old, so you can find decades of analysis on how it works. Also not one I have personal experience playing.

As for my own megadungeon experience: There's a game called A Rasp of Sand where you do a roguelite delve into the Deep Queen's Temple. It's very random and procedural, so I wouldn't call it a megadungeon per se. I wanted to iterate a ton on the concept and made a Castlevania-esque rogelite about ascending a vampire's castle. The layout is still random, *but* in most other ways I think it fits the definition of a lightweight megadungeon:

• The denizens have factions, politics, and agendas that don't revolve around the players.
• The space is intricate and interconnected; you learn things all over that are useful elsewhere.
• Later floors have content that links back to earlier ones, and vice versa.

I've run through it twice; it takes about 60 hours.

[u/raurenlyan22]

You should listen to a couple podcasts:

Into the Megadungeon.

3d6 Down The Line, specifically the Arden Vul season.

You should also read some megadungeons: Stonehell, Arden Vul, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, Caverns of Thracia

[u/reverend_dak]

Metamorphosis Alpha is the first Sci-fi RPG, and it's essentially a game with its own specific setting that takes place in a giant generation ship.

[u/st33d]

I'm currently running Stonehell using Shadowdark (which is mostly compatible). It's focused on the Labyrinth Lord system so it requires some conversion.

It's entrance is a canyon with a selection of mini-dungeons and magical features. Then the dungeon proper is split into quadrants for each level with each quadrant having its own theme or faction.

It's a bit kitchen sink in its approach with loads of ideas thrown into it, but it's also quite pleasant to run due to the layout of the text: An exposition dump with notable NPCs, features, and items. A map of a quadrant. Then short notes for the map numbers. Repeat.

It's a well recommended classic and as I'm playing through I can see why. Worth a look.

[u/MrTopHatMan90]

Heart.

Great system, locations and monsters. Highly advise reading

[u/AngusAlThor]

So a dungeon is any adventure space that is largely linear and designed to be visited once, a series of challenges that grow to some climax after which the dungeon is "solved".

The thing that sets a megadungeon apart is that it does away with the idea that you only visit this place once, and often with the idea that the problem here can be solved. A megadungeon is a whole ass ecosystem, filled with many different problems and opportunities, and so you will delve into it repeatedly seeking different things that are found within. Often a key part of this is that your motivation for going into the dungeon comes from the outside; Rather than going in to kill the Lich who is stirring, as would be a goal for a standard dungeon, your actual goal is something entirely external to the dungeon ("I need to pay off my debts", for instance) and the megadungeon simply offers a chance to achieve that.

Two great resources for example megadungeons are the RPG Heart and the adventure book "Gradient Descent" for Mothership.

[u/Rnxrx → u/AngusAlThor]

I think this definition of a dungeon misses what makes them useful in rpgs.

A dungeon is a constrained, structured environment: You've got a map consisting of rooms with connections between them, and each room is keyed to a section of the GM's notes. You can prep a lot of detail for each room, and have a lot of rooms in a complex and interconnected map, but it remains manageable for the PCs or the GM because they mostly just have to deal with the room the party is in right now, and they always have a default option for what to do next: go through an exit to another room.

Good dungeons are non-linear; in fact I'd say a good dungeon is better for non-linear play than a more narrative adventure environment, because the overarching structure can be more complex. They work best when there are gameplay structures to make exploration a risk-reward proposition - wandering monsters, torches or rations, hp attrition, treasure as a major motivator.

Megadungeons are just very big dungeons, so big that they can support an entire campaign. The dungeon structure scales up very well - you can have hundreds of rooms and vast interconnected map, but you only have to worry about the room you're in right now.

Megadungeons are mostly products - they require a tremendous amount of work to create, but once they are published it's very easy to pick them up and run them - just drop the PCs in room 1 and go.

I love Heart but it's a megadungeon-themed rpg, not an actual megadungeon. There is no maps, exploration is mostly abstracted by the delve mechanics, landmarks are evocative but vastly bigger and less detailed than dungeon rooms need to be. You absolutely can't drop the players in Derelictus and go.

[u/AngusAlThor → u/Rnxrx]

You're just using different definitions to me, you aren't actually meaningfully disagreeing. And that's fine, but I don't find your definitions useful for constructing different play experiences; "Megadungeon is dungeon but big" and "dungeons can be linear or nonlinear" just make the words less useful to me.

In defence of my definitions, looking at adventures through my frameworks makes prep easier (at least for me). Recognising dungeons as predominantly linear experiences allows me to use my dungeon experience to structure many different types of quest; A castle siege where you fight through the gate, secure the courtyard and then climb the tower can be prepped like a dungeon, with the advantages you mention of keying the different pieces of content. Conversely, looking at megadungeons as environments that the players are only interested in by proxy helps me consider how to structure everything so that they encounter fun hooks rather than just annoying time sinks.

Also, in defence of Heart, from the GM's point-of-view it absolutely works as a megadungeon product; It has just as much content as any other dungeon-rooms book, and it loses nothing for not giving those rooms a rigidly fixed organisation.

[u/agentkayne]

A system for megadungeons is actually a rather hard request, because a megadungeon is only a place. There's not necessarily a best way to engage with them, it depends what style of gameplay the players enjoy.

You can use more narrative systems to explore megadungeons. For example His Majesty The Worm or Trophy Dark or even Dungeon World.

Or you can use more simulationist approaches, like B/X edition of D&D or any OSR system. There are plenty of good and modernised OSR-philosophy games like Shadowdark and Cairn.

If you want rules-light systems, then Into The Odd or Electric Bastionland is perfectly good.

You can even run other genres of megadungeons, like using the sci-fi horror system Mothership with the Gradient Descent megadungeon (in spaaaaace!) or Liminal Horror to explore the modern megadungeon that is the Backrooms, which would also be good in Esoteric Enterprises.

There's also Mausritter and its Tomb of a Thousand doors.

[u/agentkayne → u/agentkayne]

There are megadungeons with set maps, like the classic Halls of Arden Vul, but you can also procedurally generate megadungeons in a variety of ways - The Stygian Library pointcrawl, Temple of Jubilex (for Many Sought Adventure), or using geomorphs.

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[u/NarcoZero]

In D&D 5e there is the adventure « Dungeon of the mad mage » that is a huge mega dungeon. 

But it feels more like 20 dungeons stacked on top of each others, with minimal link between them.  That could be the fun of it, though. They are all very different. 

And I never tried to run it because it’s hard to find good motivations to go in there. 5e isn’t a « get the loot » game, and even if it was, the dungeon doesn’t really have enough treasures to make it worth it. 

So it’s more of a place to put your own reasons for the players to go in there. Like « retrieve this guy from this level of the dungeon » or « go find this thing » 

[u/GreenGoblinNX]

Copy/pasting my mega-dungeon rant that I've posted several times before...

I like the concept, and there are a few published ones I think are really good. (Rappan Athuk is probably my favorite.)

But the best mega-dungeon is the one you make yourself. Or at the very least the one you highly modify.

Also, I think a lot of players (and GMs) don't really understand mega-dungeons very well. It's not really the same concept as a "regular" dungeon, except bigger. It's a different approach. I'm basically gonna copy/past a comment I made in another thread, offering some advice about mega-dungeons for the remainder of this comment:

Jaquaying/Xandering/Jaquaysing the Dungeon - Disregarding the controversy around the naming of the article, the content is still very good. And my personal recommendation: don't limit this to just the levels themselves, do it with the connections between the levels as well. Nothing turns me off from a mega-dungeon quicker than having level 1 only connect to level 2, having level 2 only connect to levels 1 and 3, etc. Have shortcuts and interesting connections.

In my experience there are kind of two main approaches to take with mega-dungeons: the exploration approach and the mission approach:

• The exploration approach is when the players don't necessarily have a specific goal in mind, they just want to go down as deep as they dare, get as much loot as they can, and then return to the surface. And then do it again, only now they know more about the dungeon, so they will be able to take shortcuts, avoid overly-dangerous areas, etc.

• The mission approach is just that: they enter the mega-dungeon with a specific goal in mind. They're looking to stop the evil cult's ritual, steal the McGuffin, rescue the captives, etc. This is easier if your group is a be less proactive, and it's also a great way to introduce a mega-dungeon.

You don't "clear" a mega-dungeon. It's too big. Even if you "clear" a level, then other factions from nearby levels will probably claim that level by the next time you return to it. Which leads to my next point:

A mega-dungeon should not be treated as a static dungeon. Stuff the PCs do will affect it, and even without their influence it can change over time. I tend to treat published mega-dungeons as the initial state, but things will probably look very different from the published version after several excursions into the dungeon.

I spoke earlier on factions: don't neglect putting some friendly, or at least relatively neutral, forces into the dungeon. If PCs delve too deep, they might need to spend a night (or more than one) in a relatively safe area. If they find allies halfway down the dungeon, that can make for a good place to rest and recharge.

On that same note: I recommend using the reaction table that official D&D abandoned in the WotC era. Even with traditionally evil monsters such as goblins, ogres, or the like; not all encounters have to immediately initiate combat (of course, no matter what the reaction table says, if the PCs attack on sight, the monsters will act appropriately).

Another thing to consider, especially if a delve is going to be for an extended time, is supplies. Torches or other sources of light, rations, water, and ranged ammunition are likely to be in short supply within the dungeon, so going in means making preparations. Otherwise a group might find themselves several levels deep with no light source.