A Little Bit of History

I've been playing and DMing in D&D since the early 80s (the year not my age). Most of the stuff I've created has been for long running face to face campaigns and my ongoing PBeM game that started with 2ed rules and morphed over time (20+ years) to be using a mix of Pathfinder, OD&D, 5e and pretty much stream of consciousness storytelling.

Mega-dungeons: An Addiction

One of my habits is to create massive unusable mega-dungeons, I have two that have been under construction for years. One I created to fill the time while waiting for code to compile at work, mapped using Excel (lots of rectilinear rooms and orthogonal corridors) and the other at home while waiting for something to cook, while on holiday waiting for the rain to stop. This one mapped with Campaign Cartographer so odd shaped rooms are more common.

The first is constrained by the pads of A5 squared paper given out by a previous employer as note pads (thanks!) the second has randomly sized levels (1d4+1 x 1d4+1 hundres of feet on each side). 

Constructing my Mega-dungeons

Both use my own method of allocating the size and contents of rooms:

1d6 x 1d6 for the size in 10s of feet (I should really have done 1d5+1 to stopd the annoying 10' square rooms).

1d4 for the number of exits

1d4 for monster (present of a 1 is rolled)

1d6 for a trap (present if a 1 is rolled)

1d8 for treasure

1d10 for stairs

1d12 for a special feature

1d20 if a 1 comes up then the room is an odd shape, is a 20 is rolled, re-roll all the dice and combine the results.  

I coded up in C# a custom dice roller that could save sets of dice rolls so I could say - roll a corridor, roll a room etc.

From each exit roll 1d20. 1-8 you have a room, 9-20 you have a corridor.

For corridors roll 2 sets of 1d4 the first is the shape (1=straight, 2=turn, 3=T-junction and 4=crossroads), the second is how long each limb of the corridor goes.

Populating my Mega-dungeons

The 'work' mega-dungeon uses the table in the 1st edition DMG for working out what monsters are appearing, the 'home' dungeon, the table in the 3rd edition DMG. No reason for this other than it was easier to photo copy the pages for the work dungeon and I had the 3rd edition beside me at home (along with every other iteration of D&D for that matter.)

Traps were the same, though 2nd edition trap design rules were used for the work dungeon and 3rd edition for the home dungeon. In each case I have created custom tables for Inspiration Pad Pro to roll up the details. The same goes for stairs and treasure (again 1st ed and 3rd ed for the treasure tables). Special features could be a pool, a fountain, a merchant, an altar, a tangle of roots. Just something to make the room stand out from the others. 

#Megadungeon23

So a few weeks ago I saw the #megadungeon23 hashtag appear on twitter and I thought, why not? If I can have two mega-dungeons on the go why not a third. At least this one would have a finite size! It would also encourage me to put some of my writing up on a blog and spark my creativity. So some rules:

1. A room for each day but not always 1 room a day - I have a job after all!
2. Each room may not needs be a room; it could be a location or personality in town, a interesting junction or corridor feature etc.
3. I will give bare bones to any encounters but will not 'balance them' so some rooms on the early levels may be dangerous!
4. No stat blocks.
5. There are two fixed features in the dungeon: an elevator and a glass column. Both stretch from the lowest to the highest level of the dungeon.
6. Each level will use a random generation method picked from the various ones I know of including 1st ed, 2nd ed, my own, 5th ed and any other I come across.
7. Each level will have a theme, a boss and a name. I will generate these ahead of time to help with stocking etc.
8. Fixed level size, I will use one of the lovely SquareHex books to draw the dungeons.