What was the largest dungeon you ever ran as either a player or a GM; either pre-built or something unique you made for your own elfbuilding worldsetting?
Recently ran a dungeon that had 118 rooms. The party explored around 50 of them. I made pic related as a teenager, a bandit fortress built into a cliffside with caves that had mind flayers and grimlocks that the bandits were trying to keep out. I think my dad and brother explored around 3/4ths of those rooms. I know my dad was happy to cut a mind flayer in half with an insane power attack. I've made dungeons that average 30 to 60 rooms. I think 30 is honestly best. 118 rooms is kinda too big. And I'm definitely not a fan of the "five room dungeon" thing, at all, except in some cases for a very small dungeon, or for west marches when you want locations that can definitely be cleared in a single session. I still don't know what the sweet spot is. I did have a dungeon that was gonna be at least 1000 rooms at one point but I only got around 100 rooms into making it and a lot of those were bedrooms whose contents could be randomly generated to save on time (it was an entire underground city).
I ran Caverns of Thracia, but my party wiped pretty early on.
>>98875307>elfbuilding worldsettingForced meme.
>>98875384Good Dorf Fortress vibes, nicely done.
>>98875610Thanks anon. have another one, that I ran for my Pathfinder group back in 2017
>>98875384>>98875645Nicely done anon
>>98875384>>98875645These are absolutely beautiful, thank you anon!>30 roomsThoughts on Borshak's Lair?
>>98876590NTAYRTI end up with closer to 30-40 rooms but multiple floors. Something about the vast size of a megadungeon is not appealing to a lot of people I encounter or have run games with. Makes it seem insurmountable or futile and I think that clashes with a lot of player interest in success or completionism. I get that's not the idea with megadungeon delving and would like to have a group that was more into that but its a different enough mentality its harder to come by. I hear good things about Borshack's but haven't run it. I tend to mix together a few dungeon maps that appeal to me, add sections, etc. until it feels right and key them as opposed to running modules.
>>98875595Shut the fuck up, Puckee.
>>98877186You write like me
>>98877324My handwriting is goddamn atrocious. I can read it and if I slow down and concentrate it gets better, but the default bad. I write in all caps to make sure its functional. I went through the alphabet in cursive upper and lower case a while ago to see if I could still do it and it was even more fucked.
>>98877292it's a puckee memeyou're not fooling anyone.
>>98877186looks good my Australian fren
>>98876590It's okay, I like a bit more space between rooms, as I get older I don't like to have rooms bordering each other too much. But this does lead to using up more space on the graph paper for the sake of realism/aesthetics. And the former, well, a dungeon isn't really realistic in the first place. at all.>>98877186I like your style and handwriting. Also +1 for including wandering monster table.
>>98875307Largest one I played was "worlds largest dungeon" by AEG in 2005. Only time I played D&D. Took us a year to do it playing every Saturday and every other Friday. We decided it was a bit of a bad design as you had no reason to go to half of the map.
>>98879053If anyone is interested, I could make large dungeon map. I didn't know there was a market for this kind of thing.
Castle Tristenoira in Ravenloft 2e. Its a pretty big castle on its own with I think 150+ rooms and areas, but its actually 3 castles in 3 different time periods, so basically 3x as many rooms as the map suggests, and decisions in the different time periods can alter the later ones. It's a great and unforgettable adventure, very challenging to run but well worth it. It has made every other location I've used seem so easy to prep for by comparison.
>>98879682Megadungeons are a background interest in osr, have been for a while now. Dyson's been puttering away at several for likely over a decade at this point. I haven't been posting them because they're too large for 4chin's tinny filehole.
>>98879682Why the fuck would I or anyone else? We have SI to do that now. I use it to generate all the dungeons I have my players run and they haven't even noticed, let alone complained.
>>98883108Post some of your gens.
Been writing a megadungeon for a little while now, mostly trapped in rewrites/edits between my work schedule and my regular campaign. Currently 7 floors and around 500 rooms, if you don't count the extra-dimensional castle afloat in the ocean of magic at the center of the universe.
>>98883108Regardless, I've decided to start making one.Starting with a 300 by 150 square map with a palace invasion theme.I'll post it to OSR when I'm done.
>>98875307thought this image was a map of Avernum at first
>>98875307Fifteen of us made a map for our 3E game 25 years ago in high school. It was ten feet wide. We used about 3 inches of it before the group split up due to jobs and classes. I kept it for about twelve years before it ended up burning in a shed fire.
>>98884720How convenient the evidence any of this happed was lost. You didn't do shit.
>>98884641NTACreating things you enjoy for their own sake, experimentation and process work are great in and of themselves. Post what you get made, looking forward to it.
>>98885882>happedLmao stfu ESL
>>98885990>pretty normal typo>"hurrdur retard esl lol"You didn't do shit.You must have pictures to prove your statements newfag.
>>98886125>gets this triggered at being called ESLUh oh brownoid maaad
>>98886201>Uh-oh, brownoid ma—d.FTFY
My friends never had the attention span for twenty room dungeons evenI tried to run a mega dungeon and they tuned out without roleplay drama even with all my key jinglingDidn't solve simple puzzles etcI used to draw megadungeons as a kid before I knew about the concept of tabletops tooI combined the idea of regular "adventure" board games with sprawling maps and loot cards instinctivelyIf I had gotten married maybe I have run games like that for my wife if she were interestedProbably won't ever make any now though, no point and I'm too tired to enjoy it as much
>>98884641Finished the blocking, and labeled everything for myself. Now to cut it up into smaller rooms, which admittedly is the bulk of the work.>>98885932
>>98887291Currently, the labels are just broad categories of "zone vibe". I'm going to flesh it out with scenery / pathing. Got to tell the player that the entire palace has a magical anti-teleport / displacement barrier and that they can't pass through walls.
Thinking of doing a megadungeon campaign. Good systems for this kind of game? Things we should try and avoid?
>>98887291Honestly wish I could get over the soulless feeling I get from seeing this shit made digitally. Good on you for not using """SI""" like someone said but fuck, my desk is a pile of papers and notepads and easels and shit. I just can't get into it the same way on the computer.Keep truckin anon, just needed to sperg.
>>98888086Not only did you need to sperg, you needed to have a public freakout about AI even though this is a poor application for it to begin with.
>>98888672>public freakout
>>98887300>Got to tell the player that the entire palace has a magical anti-teleport / displacement barrier and that they can't pass through walls.eh this is less appealing, I understand wanting to have the dungeon be explored but that's part of exploration and they're not going to be able to endlessly cast that sort of spell. Having there be work around to the pathing based on player choice is one of the key things that keep the dungeon interesting to them and makes it more of a reactive living space. Looks good though and breaking it into theme sections first and then keying it would be the only way to make design on that scale functional.
>>98888086>digitallyUpsides and downsides. I do almost all of mine in long hand but its harder to share. I enjoy the drawing and the time it takes gives me room to think about it more. But if someone's making a dungeon that's hundreds of rooms and many floors it makes sense to build it with digital for storage and efficiency.
I'm always fascinated by these massive dungeon maps. Can any uncs tell me what it was like to play them? I assume people did 8+ hour sessions to get through them and/or just played much quicker back in the 80's and 90's?I mean, it took us a whole 4 hour session to get settled in and get through a 5 room cave system in the last campaign I was in.
>>98890718Yeah, this. If you Dimension Door into an adjacent room and don't have another cast of it, now you have to make your way through unfamiliar territory to whatever exit there may be. That's not bad, it's good.
>>98887300If those are 10' squares, you know the walls and towers are very, very big, right? No shade, just want to make sure it's deliberate.
>>98887765OSR systems are good for this type of game. Avoid the "near-OSR" shit that people keep calling OSR though, such as the Borgs or 2e. Those are different enough that it just won't work well; even 3e is a better choice for an all-dungeon game than 2e.A dark horse is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay; 1e and 2e work great as dungeon crawlers if what you want is a grotty low-level meatgrinder that never gets up into what D&D considers the mid levels.
>>98890953Play was overall faster, as each player was running multiple characters (face, hirelings, retainers, dogs, et cetera), so you were clearing rooms faster. And combat resulted in player character death more often than now. Not every table used a mapper; some DMs would draw out or reveal the map as you explored. Literally seeing your progress unfold before you on these huge maps was always cool. It's also important to remember that 30-60% of the rooms you are seeing on these maps are *empty* and much of the loot was hidden. You had to go searching through the dark places to find what was hidden without alerting what was also down there, lurking in the shadows. Sometimes you recovered a magic weapon glowing in the dead grip of a fallen adventurer who came before you; sometimes you get eaten by a grue.
>>98890718>>98891023Twas a joke, I would never do that to players. Besides if they did, the opponents in the room the move to would likely be more powerful than what they could deal with. I'd make the dungeons levels 1-20.>>98891024Stupid attempt at a got'ya my dude.No, they are 5ft squares. All of the measurements are as correct as an abstraction to a 5ft grid could be regarding the crenellation, machicolated battlements (which I have drawn), and merlon width. I am a castle aspie.A reminder that a castle merlon is about the size of a large fridgerator in both width and height. Castles are much larger than people think. But to ad a layer of complexity, this is a fantasy castle.The drum tower size is actually taken from a period blueprint, as I've already modeled parts of that castle in 3D.
>>98875307I ran stonehell for my players when it first came out, I think it was around 2010. We were playing 3.5 at the time and combat was way too much of a slog to the point where we eventually dropped it after 5-6 sessions. I want to try again using a more OSR friendly system, I feel like it would be a much better experience. Overall the amount of prep I did for it was not worth what I got out of it.>>98890953It's kind of unfair to compare dungeon crawling back in the TSR times to modern 5e D&D. Combat was very quick, players tried to avoid it if they could and characters dying wasn't really a big deal. Honestly I think D&D needs to return to initiative being a single die-roll and then all combatants on a side (Player or GM) going at the same time.Also players very rarely explored the entire megadungeon.
>>98891300No gotcha intended, Anon, it was genuinely meant to be helpful as I am also a castleburger. You see, in old-school games 10' squares are the standard, so that's what I assumed you were using.
>>98891542>Honestly I think D&D needs to return to initiative being a single die-roll and then all combatants on a side (Player or GM) going at the same time.Sword World is doing this, even in the upcoming English translation. Ran a playtest with it and the party was confused a little at first but it quickly clicked.
>>98890821Yeah, I 100% acknowledge the positives of digital formats. I wasn't being a butt when I said I wish I could get over feeling like it's missing something. I could make my life so much easier by using digital drawing tools/map-makers and shit. Do you think Inkscape is fairly easy to use?
It wasn't super popular. The encounters were samey and often slugfests. There weren't a lot of big set pieces. It was not interesting in comparison to the other one, but the party had to rush through the other one cause real life got in the way.
>>98892975I largely share your dislike of it, but I understand the practical concerns at that scale. No experience with Inkscape or any of the digital dungeon or mapping tools at all outside of paint. Might be able to ask in the /wbg/ though.
Still a WIP but I'm working on a Megadungeon for a Fallout 2d20 campaign set in Texas, the largest VaultTec ever built
>>98895491>set in Texas>El Cap visible in the background
>>98895308it occurs to me that I could possibly get the dexterity/nuance of drawn works in a digital format by getting one of those drawing pads that they make, I'll ask my friend who draws gay 40k hentai for a living what type he uses. Good suggestion on /wbg/ I'll see what they think as well.
>>98895869$70 will get you a cheap wacom tablet and it will be pretty great, but there's a learning curve on them. The pad has much less friction so you need to relearn pen control, and if your software has shitty brush and pressure settings anything you do will look ass no matter how hard you try
>>988753077 floors, counting the surfacesurface: small map of a sacrificial site around a cenoteB1: flooded tunnels full of piranhas and a spectral guardian serpent - the party only explored the most direct path between the cenote entrance and the next floor stairsB2 - tomb full of neutral mummies that had been forgotten about - party parlayed with them and investigated the history of the tomb and made a deal with one of the mummies to secretly proceed lowerB3 - claustrophobic ghoul tunnels choked with miasma - party hurried through because noise would set of swarms of ghouls coming out of the walls, part of it was flooded with a very strong current, because it lead to a waterfall to a lower area which they ended up jumping off of because they'd collapsed part of the tunnels fighting the ghoulsB4 - multi-hundred foot chain suspending a platform over lava - party just jumped and fought off firebirds while fallingB5 - crumbling platform with dragon forge over lava - environmental heat hazard, occasional showers of hot rocks, ghosts of kobold servitors, fire elementals, party sheltered for long rest in central shrine area that was saferB6 - subterranean city from the dawn of time - accessible by cage elevator and contained by chains using the city to power the lava forge above, inhabited by more ghosts, an unkillable original inhabitant of the city, and a ghost dragon that accidentally died down there, party had to solve a map-wide puzzle to get into the center of the city where the idea of death was inventedIt was roughly a session for surface/B1, two sessions for B2, a session for B3, a session for B4 and B5, then 5-6 sessions for B6, and a session to climb back out. Things were kept moving by the pressures of environmental hazards and the threat of continuing combat.
>>98900688how big were the floors?
>>98900870Between 40x40 and 80x110, getting bigger as they descended.
