Megadungeon design - first principles

The Caverns of The Rift are a megadungeon. There's no real question about that as far as I can see. It would be extremely difficult to work out exactly how big it is, though Level 1 contains 12 different sublevels or zones and 443 rooms, Level 2 contains 16 sublevels and 695 rooms, Level 3 is 14 zones and 499 rooms, and Level 4 is 4 sublevels (one of them huge) with 359 rooms. All those levels have corridors that go of to areas waiting to be further expanded, if necessary. Weirdly, the PCs completely bypassed Level 4; having just about started to explore Level 3, they decided it was too dangerous and went Level 5 instead. No, I don't understand it either.

The first 4 Levels are pretty much completely fleshed out with just over 2,000 rooms (maybe 50 of these are just notes rather than full descriptions)... 5, 6 and 7 are substantially finished (maybe 75%) and Levels 8 and 9 are partially sketched out. There is a staircase - it's almost legendary, and called 'the Endless Stair' - that connects many levels directly, but the PCs haven't found it.

Level 10 is a vast subterranean world, a kind of Underdark-ish hexcrawl (more a pointcrawl really) called the 'Abyssal Realms' (there's even a blog label for that, though to be fair I haven't posted about it for a while). That is done differently; I haven't detailed individual rooms for most areas in the Realms, more like encounter areas, but it contains something like 60 unique locations. These range in size from individual small encounters to subterranean cities. Unlike the caves of the Rift, which are quite tightly-constrained in an E-W direction (the caves the PCs have gone to stretch for about a mile along the south side of the Rift), and somewhat in a N-S direction (the south wall of the Rift is the northern edge of any tunnels, and they stretch... an undetermined distance to the south), the Abyssal Realms stretch for dozens of miles under the mountains in all directions. If the PCs make it there, the campaign will have to change, with the PCs' 'hometown' changing from the above-ground Rift City to somewhere underground that they can use as a base of operations (and place to pick up new party members). There are a few contenders for a new underground base for further exploration. But as I say, the PCs didn't reach it, and may never, as the Rift City campaign has ground to a halt. 

So, what's the point of it all? Originally when I conceived of the caverns in this huge valley called 'The Rift' I had in mind something like the Caves of Chaos, but 500 times bigger. A series of caverns over many levels that were linked together, that had factions and stories and lives, in the side of a vast valley. That seemed like a cool place to go adventuring, and provided one of the necessary elements that I'd identified for the game - an adventure site that would be suitable for repeated visits from a local base. That implies a megadungeon.

Image from Dream by Wombo, using prompt 'valley with caves'

This I think is actually my fourth megadungeon. The first was something I started nearly 30 years ago and it didn't get very far - a Dwarf complex somewhat inspired by descriptions in Magician by Raymond Feist, and Song of the Dwarves by Thorarin Gunnarsen, that I was reading in the early 1990s, I think. I had a few plans but did very little work on it. That was folded into my second megadungeon, Silvergate, the abandoned Dwarven city that got somewhat further but has still stalled (or maybe been abandoned... by me rather than the Dwarves this time, though it also has a blog label). I think I'll probably go back to that and try to push it forward at some point though.

The third megadungeon I think never even made onto the blog. I don't know why to be honest, it would have been good to throw some ideas around here. As it is, it exists only on Facebook. Again it's a stalled project, an attempt to co-operatively build a megadungeon. There's been some serious work put in by one contributor - not me. It's called 'The Labyrinth of Nodnol' (link here for those on Facebook) and is based on the London Underground/Overground map.

Then came The Rift. A few of us were talking about starting a D&D campaign and I offered to DM it. I didn't really have any ideas other than that the structure needed to account for people not being able to make every session, so the idea that the dungeon needed to be near the PCs' home base came about. This would allow them to make periodic visits to the dungeon, rather than having a campaign based on travelling from one dungeon area to the next (or even, travelling overland to a series on minidungeons). Perhaps that will be the format of the next campaign; perhaps it won't. The other option of course is just a huge underground exploration, but I wanted to get round the problem players not being able to make consecutive sessions and their PCs being stuck in limbo while life went on a round them. So, I decided on a structure that says that the PCs get the hell out of the dungeon between sessions.

Constantly travelling to the same place also implies lots of entrances. The PCs discovered (I think) 16 entrances into the caves, which variously take them to Levels 1 (7 entrances), 2 (4 entrances); they also discovered one entrance each for the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th levels. As I say, this is from memory, there may have been more they discovered.

I used a variety of methods to generate the content. A lot of it has come from some random dungeon generators, particularly Donjon's (link) AD&D Dungeon Generator. Other Dungeon Generators are available, and some have been used, including the old WotC Generator (like much of the free content on Wizards, this seems to have been taken down sometime around May 2022) and Save versus Total Party Kill's 'Dungeon with x Rooms' (link here) - it only generates short room descriptions so I've also used maps from Dyson (link) and Paratime (link), among others, as well as creating a lot of my own. All of these sources have been smushed together to create the (approximately) 2,400 rooms so far detailed/mapped out in the Caverns of the Rift.

But, now I'm going to start a new megadungeon, though as the Rift Caverns had 2,400 rooms and were not finished, the projected new megadungeon with 365 rooms looks a bit tiny. This new megadungeon is my response to the "Dungeon23" project. This is a kind of design challenge that basically asks for a dungeon-room a day, every day through 2023. The original post is here, though I found it on a Facebook post from someone else. There is a hashtag, #dungeon23, but I don't do twitter and that probably hasn't worked anyway. In the original post, the 'rules' are pretty simple - "Megadungeon for 2023. 12 levels. 365 rooms. One room a day. Keep it in a journal."

I don't have a nice journal, but I do have a blog. I'm not promising to post every day but I will try to post much more regularly than I have been doing. This timetable does give momething to aim at.

I first read the original post today, but heard about this a couple of days ago. The original says (words to the effect of) 'generators are fine, the point is to get it done and produce something'. But, I've built a megadungeon (substantially) with generators. I want to exercise my grey matter. I *could* just go to 'Save versus Total Party Kill' and ask the dungeon-room randomator to produce a 365-room dungeon. Then all I'd have to do was map it. That would save loads of bother. Or I could get Donjon's generator to produce 12 dungeons of about the right size and tweak anything from there. Both of these would be valid ways given the original guidance to produce the required output, but I want to see if I can do this from the power of my own brain. I may well at some point fall back on the generators, but I want to resist that as long as I can, so I can get an idea of what I can do by relying as much as I can get away with on my wits.

I have an idea about the overall design and how I'm going to 'pattern' the rooms/days, and I have an idea about how I'm going to populate it wit monsters, traps and treasure (it will involve using Moldvay pretty heavily) but I have almost no ideas about what I will actually put in as content, except that room/day 1 will be an entrance. That's all I know right now, except for one thing that I will tease you with because I don't want to say just now. I have for a long time wanted to construct a certain type of dungeon and this will be that type. That's all.

Hopefully come the New Year I'll start posting more about this. In the meantime, happy dungeonering, folks!

Should really have put this at the beginning of the Moldvay stuff...

I have, of course, been trying to stock more of Silvergate. Whether this will also impinge on the Abyssal Realms I don't know (though by the way I've got hold of some lovely material from I'll See It When I Believe It which I will be definitely incorporating all over the place, including the Abyssal Realms).

So, as it says in the title, this is probably what I should have put first in the posts about Moldvay. But, because I'm an idiot, I didn't, and I've had to go back looking for this. It's a corridor-generator from The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms - it's what I used to give me some content that I could build a section of dungeon from. I did what it suggested and used four letter-shapes (but I didn't bother to do anything fancy about rotating or flipping them, I just decided to 'not make them look like letters'). No proper map I'm afraid, as I have to preserve some mystery, but I did a schematic. The original shapes for my corridors are

... which is 'OSR' and the randomly generated letter '(lower case) g'. So now it stands for OSR gaming, or maybe OSR gangster. As per the directions for how to turn this into corridors, I mushed the letter-shapes together so they were all joined up and began treating them as per the instructions.

However, when I applied the rules for what happens on a corridor, as I hadn't established a scale, I guessed where 'every 60 feet' might be, to roll for doors and stairs and whatnot.

I ended up with 34 rooms, of which maybe 3 are really just broom-cupboards or hidden niches. I'm calling it '34 including 10a' anyway.

Another problem (after guessing scale) was that I didn't have anything to say what was on the other side of the door, at the end of the corridor, etc. The post on The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms says "I am assuming here that you are using tables borrowed from Appendix A or another random dungeon generator to roll for size and shape of rooms, type of door, what's behind each door, or other details as needed."

Well, no, unfortunately, I don't have any such table to hand, Moldvay doesn't include one. Going to have to do something about that, I really need dungeon-dressing tables. But I muddled through, mostly by just filling up some of the space on my map with pseudo-random shapes derived from Paint - circles, a star in one place, a couple of pentagons and hexagons, rectangles with square or rounded corners. Sometimes when it looked like two corridors might join, I joined them, sometimes I imposed rooms (joined or not).

One thing that seemed to make sense but that I have probably never done before - never, even though some such thing is heavily implied in Keep on the Borderlands, and therefore might be considered a 'standard' design feature for those of us of the Moldvay era - is the placing of a room at the end of a 'blocked' corridor. (I actually applied this solution twice, but ended up deleting one because I thought two in a area of less than 36 rooms was overusing the idea). There is a whole bunch of semi-ruined portions of this (sub-)level, but one of the ruined corridors leads to a room that is not accessible by any other means. Sneaky, huh? They'll just have to have a Potion of Gaseous Form or something. Not sure how they get the treasure out though...

A minor mystery solved

A couple of months ago, posting about the material I'd found in a box in the loft, I mentioned a Dwarf called Tholinn and his magic hammer. I think I've tracked down the source (though the spelling in the probable source is 'Tholin').

I've been reading Raymond E Feist's Magician, which is (in essence) a story of how a young man grows up and develops his magic powers while becoming involved in the great events of his time, Which I'll grant you could describe a lot of fantasy stories.

In this novel, there is a character called Dolgan, who is a Dwarf chieftain. About a third of the way into the book, Dolgan finds a magic hammer, that belonged to a Dwarven hero called Tholin, in an underground location connected with dragons.

My 'hammer of Tholinn' is a magic hammer, previously belonging to a Dwarf-hero called Tholinn, that is to be found in an underground location connected with dragons (the entrance to the dungeon is dominated by a colossal dragon statue). I think the close connection in conception is pretty strong evidence that I had Magician in mind when writing the notes. The extra 'n' was possibly a typo, or maybe etymologically I wanted to get a bit further from 'Tholin/Thorin' (which I'd regard as being philologically equivalent). But I think the typo, or perhaps 'scribal error' (as these were hand-written notes) is probably more likely. I think, when I wrote the notes, I possibly didn't have the book in front of me and was going from memory of what I'd been reading. And having perpetrated the error, I'd likely just keep doing it (it occurs a couple of times in my notes), as I didn't necessarily ever compare manuscripts.

I have at least started reading Magician before. In mid-1993, I borrowed it from one of my house-mates, who was a friend from college and also a big fantasy and sci-fi fan. I gave it back unfinished some time later - so when a couple of months ago (about the same time as my original post two months ago) I saw a second-hand copy in a charity sale, I bought it, thinking 'ah, a second chance to finish that!'.

So that would suggest that the notes were written in or after the summer of 1993. Not long after, as 'Tholin(n)'s dragon-connected magic hammer' was it seems a fresh enough idea in my mind to require no explanation whatsoever. Possibly not immediately as I might have forgotten how to spell 'Tholin' (though that's not conclusive, I might have been just too lazy to check the spelling in the book). So my guess (using other evidence, like handwriting - I know this wasn't done when I was 15 for instance) of 'about 1992' is not so bad - 'mid-late 1993' is now my guess for this.

I like the symmetry of  coming back to the dungeon (at least partly-) inspired by Magician at the same time as starting to re-read the book. It made finding the reference to 'the hammer of Tholin' seem like a real discovery - a reference to my own forgotten (or at least legendary) past!

Underground hexcrawls

Started yet another megadungeon-style project: but this one is actually more like an underground hexcrawl. It has the provisional title of 'Abyssal Realms', and may or may not be accessible from Silvergate if and when any players venture far enough...

The design philosophy has been inspired by several things.

First, a few weeks ago, I was on holiday and happened to find a games shop that had a sale on various things, especially books. Twenty minutes later I had three new purchases, coming to the grand total of £5.50. One of these, for a whole £3, was a Swords & Wizardry book called Cyclopean Deeps Vol 1, by Matthew J Finch and published by Frog God Games. This details (the first half of!) a high-level underground setting (much deeper than standard dungeons) called... the Cyclopean Deeps, obviously. It has underworld factions and politics, cities and quests (there's a strong probability the PCs will end up as bounty hunters in the dark under the Underdark). It's effectively set up as a hexcrawl, with somewhat limited options for travel (because not every location has a tunnel in every direction. More a node-point exploration I suppose). So that was what made me think I could do something in a similar vein.

Secondly, I happened on a link to Build A Dungeon From Me. I haven't been in a while,  but there's been no new content since April 2015 anyway: but the principle I think is great (I wish I had a good way of setting up a similar feature for this blog), and I randomised some images and wrote notes on what was produced - 20 images that produced two points of interest for each of 10 underground zones.

Extending that principle I then google-searched images for 'Fantasy Monsters' and 'Dungeons' and 'Enemies' and a few other search terms, then randomised the results to produce further images, in order to generate more encounters, NPCs and locations. I tacked these on to the 10 zones I had already established, to produce denser concentrations of encounters. Some surprising things came up - more Giant Tortoises (really, more like Titanic Tortoises) than I'd expected (so I need to write some rules for titanic underground tortoises), the odd armoured bear (who is now an armoured Bugbear) and a few NPCs and monsters are somewhat inspired by John Carter and Dejah Thoris, Rydia and the Iron Golem from Final Fantasy, because that's what my random images were.

Much of the donkey-work of coming up with random NPCs (actually very few are 'random', they're juxtapositions of elements from various sources) came from these sites: Generator 1 Generator 2 (from donjon, a long-term randomiser of choice!) and Generator 3. Between them I managed to find enough descriptions, sets of stats and bits of history/personality to keep me happy.

The third main inspiration was Swords & Stitchery - I often go there to marvel in the weirdness of a Lovecraftian/Howardian/Clarke Ashton Smith take on D&D, and sometimes copy random tables and such-like. I wanted the Abyssal Realms to have something of that feel, so along with the more 'normal' elements (see titanic tortoises, above...) I decided to use a few of the random tables - especially those relating to the collapsed Hyperborian civilisation. Now, parts of the Realms have references to the Atlantean Crown Jewels, sky-ships, Great Old Ones and who-knows what else?

I've been sketching the maps more or less roughly. There's no real detail yet, just different zones and some connections between them. Most of the inhabitants from this first pass have been established now (I've done the first 8 zones now, the other two should be finished soon) and then the real work comes in filling in all the missing details... I've painted with a very broad brush but it's just an outline of the Abyssal Realms at the moment. Putting flesh on the bare bones I think will take quite a while...

Returning to Silvergate

Right, looking through my Silvergate material, it seems that the stuff I have from my old folder will be OK to slot in to a couple of places. Yes, I can fit the 'new' material from my original megadungeon (henceforward, prefaced Mx, to distinguish it as a 'Megadungeon' level, rather than the original Silvergate material) into levels 1 and 1a with a little re-jigging, which will include adding more connections between M1 and M1a, as well as some connections towards Silvergate proper. Because there's an east-facing M1 entrance, and a north-facing M1a entrance (I've worked out what the cave in the 'back of cave' note was - I included it on one of my side-views), these are now going to be in the north-east of Levels 1 and 1a. Luckily, I used the same numbering technique for my two megadungeons 20-odd years apart (originally, I thought the megadungeon material was from around 1987, but I've re-dated it now I've had a really good look at it, and think it's probably from early 1990s rather than mid-late '80s - probably the '1992' I reported the other day is more or less accurate).

I do have some random Goblins and Orcs hanging about about on Levels M1 & M1a that don't necessarily 'belong' but I think I can live with that, especially if I can move other stuff around so other Orcs and Goblins (are there any Goblins? I can't remember any) are tending towards the north-eastern part of Silvergate. The 30+ Orcs I have detailed for the inhabitants of this area can become the main part of the (small) Orc-lair I had marked down for the 'Stirge Caves' area of Silvergate. Guess what's going to be living in the '(back of) cave'?

Level M2 I think still works and maybe can be peopled from the lairs for Silvergate I've already generated but haven't mapped. The old Level M4 map will perhaps have to be scrapped (it seems to be a composite of other maps from published sources) and I know all the usable 'Black Bone Orcs' material (which is mid-'80s, without a doubt) will be put on Level 4 - definitely not the Orcs' map, though, as it will need extensively reworking to make it usable and I think it's probably easier to start again. I will, as an exercise, try to fit the Black Bone material with the existing Level M4 map, and if I'm happy I might leave it. Otherwise, both maps will go and I'll start with a blank canvas.

I have a little puzzle that has occurred due to abandoning this material and then forgetting about it. I refer a couple of times to 'Tholinn' and his (? probably his) hammer in the megadungeon notes. I don't now know who 'Tholinn' is meant to be. Presumably, at the  time I was writing, Tholinn was a figure that didn't need an explanation. Some Dwarven ancestor, hero or god, I assume from context, but I don't know which. It's easy enough to pick one - chances are I'll make him the founder and first King of Silvergate, but it would be nice if I could recapture what my original idea was. If anyone recognises the name as a Dwarf deriving from another source, please do let me know! It may well help elucidate what I had in mind when I wrote it.

And then, and then, and then... will I actually get to run it? I've been toying with the idea of trying to find somewhere that will host an open gaming table. If I can, I might try out the upper levels on anyone who wants to try their luck.

Old-time Orc Lair notes

I think my inspiration for this can pretty directly be traced to a White Dwarf article called The Naked Orc from WD53, from May 1984 (info here).

Other references are to the White Dwarf Personalities (rules in WD50, figures on Stuff of Legends here, a couple of mine here). I use the names 'Agaroth the Unwashed' for an Orc captain (with 6HD) and 'Ugbash Face-splitter' for a chief (with 7HD). Both of these names are from the White Dwarf Personalities set  (no matter that they spell it 'Ogbash' on SoL, I'm right, they're wrong). Agaroth is an Orc to the WD folks - or Half-Orc at least - but Ugbash is a Chaos Warrior so I'm not sticking to my sources.

They probably date this package pretty well. 1984 or early '85 at the latest I guess. Pretty certain that by late 1985, I'd have called an Orc-Chief 'Harboth'.

Lord of the Rings is also an obvious influence, both directly on me in the case of names and iconography, and also on the article.

So what does this great Orc lair consist of? 4½ pages of notes and 2 versions of the map, in short.

The first map, which I shall think of as the draft version, is on a sheet of plain paper (I don't know where from, this is long before printer-paper was a thing) and has a cave-system (obviously inspired by the Caves of Chaos) with rooms numbered up to 53 (probably 56 in fact, I've spotted that I've got 12,13,14 in different places, there's a 14a attached to one of them, and I've not found 21) divided between five groups of Orcs, these being the Orcs of the Black Bone, Slobbering Jaw, Eye, Moon and White Hand. Each of the first four groups has its own entrance (Black Bone has two, I can't find an entrance for the White Hand, who were I think intended to be a shamanic group inhabiting the innermost recesses of the caves), but the caves connect internally. It's a single level complex, and I've marked a lot of what I guess are doors 'L' which surely means 'Locked'.

The second version of the map is on graph paper that was probably stolen from a maths-book. There are now four 'clans', Black Bone, Slobbering Jaw, Eye and Moon. The whole map is entitled 'Tribe of the White Hand'. Again it's a single-level complex about 2,700' or half a mile across, but now there are 73+ rooms (numbering is also screwy on this map - there doesn't seem to be a '4' but there are two '6's, two '10's, three identical '13's next to each other, and a bunch of annexes marked A-F - all in all there must be closer to 90 rooms), but only one 'shared' room - the four cave-systems meet at a large square room which I think is intended as a kind of assembly-chamber, shrine or possibly some kind of fighting-pit, it's difficult to tell (and I can't remember). At a guess, this is about 6 months-a year later than the first draft. 

In both versions of the map, the majority of rooms and corridors are constructed, but there are a few intended to evoke natural caverns. Both times, I've started numbering with the Black Bone clan, The accompanying notes (that seem to have been composed just after the first draft of the map, there are crossings-out and corrections that indicate that they were composed to go with the draft map and corrected for the second map) all relate to the Black Bone clan. These notes include a Wandering Monster Table with 12 encounters; a tally of the Black Bone clan's strength in terms of numbers of males, females and young for each of The Naked Orc's types - Snaga (80, 150 and 330), Soldier Orcs (12, 30, 46) and Uruks (3, 1, 4); basic stats and details of equipment and treasure for the four Uruks (Ugbash, his mate Gargantua, and his two captains Agaroth and Zargob); a list with less detail (but still including names) of the 12 male and 10 of the female Soldier Orcs in the clan; and a list of 23 prisoners, which includes an NPC Magic User, who is fully-statted.

Then there are the room descriptions. These amount to rooms 1, 1a (a guard-post) and room 2. The description of room 3 has been started but only notes its size. So out of about 90 rooms, I managed to create three. I didn't even get anywhere near the 20-25 rooms (depending on which version of the map I was using) that I needed for the lair of the (Orcs of the) Black Bone (Clan). I do however know that Lagduf & Muzburg are on guard in Room 1, Zabron & Gargan in 1a.

The total population of the Orcs of the Black Bone Clan is 656. The fighting population is about 106 (I'd obviously intended some but not all of the females to fight). The implication of this being only one of the four clans is that the total population in the entire complex was intended to be about 2,500 and the total number of fighting orcs about 420 (about 1 in 6).

That's a truly vast population in my opinion. It implies an average of around 29 orcs per room, of which 4 or 5 will be fighters. It's also around four times bigger than what I consider to be the huge Orc population of Silvergate, as detailed here. Or, to put it another way, the Black Bone Orcs are about the same size of population as my Silvergate Orc-lair (656 v 640, 109 v 160 in fighting strength). So I'm going to tweak this info a little and use it for my Silvergate Orc population. I'll add the 38 adult (including some with clerical skills) and 15 young Orcs from the descriptions for my original Dwarf-city megadungeon (mentioned here) and roll the two together. Then I need to drop two Trolls into the mix and voilà, I have my Orc-lair.

Given that I was wondering in this post about the use of bone (and other substances) as an alternative for scarce wood and metal, the fact that long ago I called these the 'Black Bone' Orcs is a serendipitous co-incidence. Maybe, the tribe's totemic item is a huge black bone of a dragon or some other underworld denizen, kept in a cave at the centre of their settlement, or some such. It is little more than a bit of flavour, but perhaps I can run with this theme and have them wielding 'black bone' weapons or utilising (black) bone armour. I wouldn't want these guys to just be another vanilla population of Orcs to be slaughtered. Something to make them stand out, even a little, would be good. After all, they've been with me (even if largely forgotten) for nearly 33 years!

Lost Megadungeon details

I had a reasonable idea, I think, for the East-facing entrance to my original megadungeon. The doors (15' wide each, and 30' high, and flanked with towers) open onto a kind of ledge, with a long narrow bridge stretching away about 185'. The bridge is above what I've called the 'Bargaining Floor' - this settlement was obviously intended to be heavily involved in commerce. Steps lead down from the ledge into this large room. The bridge ends at a large platform with a statue of a dragon on it, and an entrance (shh! It's secret!) to the rest of the complex.

There isn't much of this that I actually did - a couple of pages of notes, detailing 11 rooms on Levels 1 and 1a, four maps, which cover the areas I have the descriptions for and hint at what I had in mind for some others (the other levels I've drawn seem to be parts of 2 and 4, connected by truly enormous staircases, though many of the details on the maps are now obscure to me), and a couple of sketches of how levels relate. Some of the notes on the maps are frustrating - on the Level 2 map, 'to Level 4 and the South Gate' presumably means I had another part of Level 4 in mind, because the part of L4 I do have connects to another part of the L2 map. I don't know what 'back of cave' means (or rather, I don't know which cave it refers to). I do know what 'to Anak/Noegyth' means (this dungeon was originally intended to link to maps and other info I wasn't otherwise going to use) but I won't be allowing the players to do that. That staircase will now have to lead somewhere else - to a brand-new Level 3. The Level 4 I have here is going to be scrapped for the same reason - I'm replicating maps from other sources that I've now 'folded back' into the existing game-world.

It seems that the entrance-level is actually quite small. I guess my thinking was that it would be easy to isolate this area if the city was attacked. The staircase from the platform takes you down to Level 2, which then leads back up to Level 1a - that might need tweaking a little, perhaps there should ways to access other parts of the complex from Level 1, perhaps from the 'Bargaining Floor' - but I like the design of the entrance. I was obviously having a good couple of days when I did this, whenever it was (I suspect about 1992).

I think I will try to tie this information back into Silvergate and try to use this stuff as a subsidiary eastern entrance (the main entrance I've already designed for Silvergate - bigger than this one - faces south). Finding a way of linking Silvergate's topmost levels with these will - slightly - increase my room-count for Silvergate and add some new options and routes for the players. However, this stuff was produced by the 'old me' (see for details this post for example). The default monsters here are Orcs, Goblins and Rats. Perhaps as I need an Orc lair on Level 4, I should just plonk this on top and replace the Level 4 map with my Orctown? That might work.

In all, there's about 25 rooms here of salvageable map, and 11 descriptions, a few of which I'm pretty proud of. There are also two more options for actually getting into the place, through the new entrance proper, and through the 'back of the cave', wherever that turns out to be (about 600' to the north and 250' west, and then maybe a little down the hill, I'd say). Perhaps that is one of the entrances I already know about? I need to get my Silvergate file and take a look.

Ah well, we'll see. It's made me think about Silvergate again, and you never know, I might even start running it soon...

Notes on my original megadungeon and other ancient goodies

Looking in an old box of papers in my loft, I've come across some old gaming stuff, which it seemed was transferred from one box to another nearly 20 years ago without ever really being sorted out. These papers, on closer examination, included:

... the notes for my original megadungeon. These would be about 30 years old or a bit more. I only got round to detailing a relatively small area of the first couple of levels, and no-one ever played it. Like Silvergate, it is a Dwarf city; but really that's where the similarity ends. My idea with... not even sure it had a name ... was to take things I had and bodge together the bits I wasn't otherwise going to use to make a crazy labyrinth. In pre-internet days decent maps were like gold-dust and primarily this was a way of recycling unused maps from White Dwarf. There were some scenarios I thought I wouldn't play without a lot of work, generally because they were for AD&D and I didn't have the Monster Manual. Because of this various monsters were somewhat obscure to me - I think, Sahuagin and Kenku particularly. Everything I knew about Sahuagin I gleaned from DDG; I knew nothing about Kenku at all. I seem to remember that I eventually decided I'd just replace them with Lizardmen and Halflings respectively. Some of this stuff might even end up being incorporated into Silvergate: there's a nice bit with a petrified giant I might include.

... the first 'wilderness' setting I designed, in approximately 1983. It featured a castle, and nearby a dungeon stuffed with Orcs and evil priests. Obviously, it was heavily influenced by Keep on the Borderlands, which came packaged with my copy of the Basic Set. One of the things that really dissatisfied me at the time with my version - and it's a criticism often levelled at the original - is that the scale is all wrong. I abandoned work on it when the idea of a large inimical-humanoid base in a dungeon two miles or so from the castle of the local lord just seemed... daft. There may, however, turn out to be some things that can be salvaged, though I don't remember very much. I haven't even looked at this stuff since I was a teenager.

... notes towards my first 'campaign setting', referred to in this post where I discuss my much-later Arthurian campaign:

...The Four Treasures - two of which had become the direct objects of mythic quests already - would each be linked to an element in the classical system of elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water). Each element would also be linked to a race. This goes back to a very early stratum of my campaign-design, the first campaign notes I ever wrote in about 1981. Back then, I assigned the elements on the following basis: Dwarves - Fire; Elves - Air; Halflings - Earth; Humans - Water. This time, I assigned them as Dwarves - Earth; Elves - Air; Humans - Water; Orcs - Fire...

Well, those are the notes I found, though I now think that they're probably from 1982 instead. Some notes about meeting an old dying Halfling on the road, and him pressing a jewel into one party member's hand and telling them a scrap of poetry. And then dying of course. I imagined it would be an epic quest, naturally - except it never happened, I never ran it. I wouldn't even consider doing something similar now - far too railroady, not enough opportunities for player choice. But perhaps the set-up could still work as a lead-in a bit more dramatic than hearing a rumour at the tavern.

There's other stuff too; a fairly meticulous cave-system with different factions of Orcs is one thing I think I saw while I was looking through the pile of paper, which may also end up as part of the long-stalled Orc settlement in Silvergate. Another is a series of notes trying to build a campaign from In Search of the Unknown, where Zelligar comes back and blackmails the PCs into doing stuff for him. Basically, it's my unused DMing notes 1982-87 or thereabouts. I didn't however find my DDG-inspired pantheon I wrote around 1983 - that would be interesting I think. A more careful sort through what is actually there is definitely in order (just in case those notes are there).

Now I'm seriously thinking that I should just smash all this stuff together and call it a sandbox... it should all more-or-less work, though it lurches from the gonzoid to hackneyed and back again with gay abandon. There's a certain naive charm about it. I mean this isn't 'old school', it's not retro or revivalist - it's genuinely just old.

More MegaDungeon than you can shake a ten-foot pole at (or, 'How Dyson Saved Silvergate')

I admit it, I have been extensively raiding Dyson's maps. I tried some other sites, but they just weren't cutting the mustard.

Perhaps I'm very picky about what I want; I don't think I am. It seems to me that a dungeon-generator (of which there are dozens of free ones out there) should be relatively-controllable. But none of the generators I consulted allowed me to do the things I wanted to do.

I'm designing Silvergate in sections. The whole city will be built as a series of areas which can be thought of as something like districts or neighbourhoods, though they're really quite small. A megadungeon built of lairs bolted together, sure, but bolted together in a way that sort of makes some sense, please. And as (at a guess) I need something like 60 of these sections, each with 25-45 (or there abouts) rooms, that's about 2000 rooms all together. A lot of mapping.

My ideal generator would ask questions like 'how many rooms do you want for a given area?' and 'how many exits in which directions?' and 'do you want a) a mix of large and small rooms, b) few large and many small, or c) few small and many large?' - but those I've consulted don't ask those sorts of questions. Just some randomly-plonked spaces and corridors aren't so much use (even if they do come populated from some generators). Fine in theory for a random lair, not so good for a section of a bigger whole that is supposed to hang together in some way.

So I'm back to either drawing the maps myself or taking someone else's. I certainly have drawn some of my own. I will draw more of my own as I go along. But I'm also going to use some of Dyson's maps in the production of Silvergate as a playable megadungeon.

But, Orc, I hear you cry; surely the problem is that you can't control them? If a dungeon generator can't produce the results you want, how can taking existing maps from somewhere else?

Well, even if I can't control them exactly the way I want there are several advantages to using Dyson's maps. The main one is that due to his prolific production, there are hundreds of potential maps to be selected, and unlike a generator where I feed in the parameters and get it to produce something for me, I can see them before I download them, and if something looks useful, I can take a closer look and if I like what I see, I can download it.

There are three reasons really that I'm going to use some of Dyson's mega-delve material: a) they're very nice maps in their own right; b) they (at least some of the time) fit together in a logical way both horizontally and vertically, giving me more coherence about how the city is designed, and c) because Dyson's megadungeon is a Dwarf-city too, and so, why not?

If I find anywhere else that produces maps of the same quality, then I'll use them as well. But I haven't yet.

Orc-town - 4th Level lair - initial thoughts

Because there hasn't been much adventuring going on lately (probably something to do with me wiping out the party, I don't know), I'm posting once more about Silvergate. Recently I described the random (and somewhat unexpected) creation of a large lair of Orcs on the 4th level in this post here. About 640 of them, all together, with a fighting strength of around 160, and a couple of Trolls.

That sort of thing isn't necessarily easy to just slot into a corner of a level. 640 Orcs take up a lot of room, so I am in effect designing a lair the size of a small human town around the idea of an Orc-tribe holding a section of the Dwarf-city.

I need to think about a bunch of things:

food
water
waste
fuel
non-food/fuel supplies (eg wood for tools, weapons etc)
clothing, rope, leather straps etc
patrols
social activities (religious rites, community gatherings)

This I think relates in some way to this post about dungeon ecology. How do monsters relate to each other, and what are they actually 'doing' all the time? How do they live? What do they eat? Where is their water coming supply coming from?

More specifically, are these Orcs producing their own food from their territory? Are they essentially 'farming' a section of the dungeon (eating rats and fungus, for example)? Do they hunt for food in the caverns? Are the patrols they send out 'guards' or 'hunters'?

Presumably, their massive quantities of Orc-slurry become the food for something else, which then becomes the food for something else, which is then eaten by the Orcs, and thus the cycle of life continues. But presumably there are some inputs into the system from outside - unless these Orcs are completely self-sufficient. So the idea of sending out regular patrols of Orcs to both sweep the corridors and hunt for food, or strangers who might trade/be robbed of wood or other valuable surface-items seems reasonable.

These Orcs would perhaps see wood as too useful to burn - unless, of course, it's so valuable as fuel to that they don't make mere clubs and spears out of it. Either way I'd expect that they'd be making things out of bone, keratin, chitin etc. Likewise, though they can make leather from rat or lizard skin (for example) perhaps the Orcs would also be using Giant Spider silk for ropes or straps and maybe they've even learned to weave it into fabric.

Without a source of a lot of fuel, iron-working is going to be very difficult so metal weapons are going to be in short supply, unless someone outside is supplying them in exchange for something else. Perhaps along with the bone and chitin, the Orcs are goingto be working stone rather than metal. I think the trick is going to be to pick some things in which the Orcs are self-sufficient and some others that they have to acquire from outside their caves.

There will definitely be a source of water, of that I am absolutely certain. There are several potentials here. The city when it was in its heyday was heavily-populated and the Dwarves were water-engineers. Some aspects of this water-management system survive so maybe the Orcs inhabit an area where the water comes from the Dwarves' plumbing. There are cisterns and conduits - perhaps some of these still work, or perhaps the breakdown of this system just means that some rooms are partly-flooded and these areas become 'watering holes' - either guarded by one faction, or used as a 'neutral space' by different factions.

Food doesn't seem to be too difficult. There are plenty of things that Orcs could eat, that don't necessarily have to appear on the Wandering Monster list or in lairs. Animals, plants and fungi only really need stats if they're a threat to the PCs. Something that can't harm the PCs, but is no use to them either (like a giant woodlouse that is poisonous for humans and Dwarves but Orcs find palatable, that can't bite through human skin) doesn't need a stat because it's more like a part of the room description than a 'monster' as such.

Working with these kind of notions should allow me to make the Orc-lair a recognisable part of the megadungeon, without necessarily having to tweak the results of my random rolling too much, which I'm loth to do, as I'm trying to run the creation process as 'straight' as I can get away with.

Orcs? What Orcs?

Oh, those Orcs...

Now you may remember in a post a couple of days ago I was boasting of creating a dungeon with a very few Orcs in it and many other things - something of a first for me, Orcs and/or Goblins are pretty much always my 'go-to' monster. I have been fighting the Dwarf-Goblin Wars for around 35 years now and don't seem to show any signs of stopping soon. They are to me pretty much the archetypal Minion of Dread Powers. In fact, this very evening I was reading Lord of the Rings to my youngest as a bedtime story. We reached the part in Mordor where the two Orcs, the brown-clad snuffling tracker and the soldier-orc from Cirith Ungol (probably) argue and fight near Sam & Frodo's position. Great stuff. Gotta love a bit of Orcy-Gobliny action, I say. Oh, and I am 'Red Orc' of course.

But, in creating Silvergate, I was for a while steering away from the Orcs, going where the dice took me. It's been quite a liberating experience. OK, I know, Bugbears are just big hairy Goblins. But never mind.

However, what I didn't bank on was the nature of random rolling. In the same post as I mention the lack of Orcs, I also outline my method for rolling either smaller numbers of higher-HD monsters, or larger numbers of lower-HD monsters, for filling the levels I'm detailing. And I rolled a few '1's while filling in monsters for Level 4. That brought me back up into the heady realms of monsters from Levels 1 and 2. What did I roll? Yup, Orcs.

Now, I'd said that there were only about 30 in the dungeon. That wasn't quite right. There were about 30 in the lair. Of fighting Orcs. Plus chief and bodyguard. Then there were a few wanderers, about 10-12 all together. Then there were the non-combatant Orcs both adult (described in the rules as 'female' but frankly I think the idea of female Orcs being like frightened Victorian ladies having fits of the vapours to be a little ludicrous) and young. So by my reckoning roughly 160, of which around 45 are combatants.

Now there are a lot more. I mean, really, a lot more. I rolled both a wandering group (how do you scale wanderers from Level 1 or 2 to Level 4? Have lots more of them, obviously) and a lair. Wandering group? Make up the Number Appearing. I rolled a lot of dice. A group of 33 Orcs appeared. That's the size of the entire fighting force of the lair a couple of levels above. And that's a Wandering Monster.

Then I rolled for the lair and things got a bit mental. Now, I may not be scaling things correctly. But I reasoned, if you run into x-amount on Level 1, you must run into 4x-amount on Level 4, right? Well, it turns out if you do that, you get 160 fighting Orcs in the lair. Plus 160 more adult non-coms and 320 young. And 2 Trolls. No Ogres though. I thought 'for every 20 Orcs there is a 1-in6 chance of an Ogre living with them' was more likely to mean 'roll a d6 for each 20 Orcs' not 'add 1 to the probability for each 20 Orcs'. The first would produce 0-8 Ogres (it produced 0), the second would definitely produce 1 Ogre and a 1/3 chance of a second. Plus, 0-8 Trolls, or, 8/10 chance of a single Troll. Those aren't the same probabilities at all. But, of course, that may not be how other people interpret that rule. I've never had to configure it this way, as I've never before tried to make a lair for more than 600 Orcs. So I'm flying somewhat blind here.

I like the idea of a series of caverns filled with Orcs. Maybe not much part of the main goings on in the dungeon - just off to one side somewhere, doing their thing, settling down to live in an old Dwarf city and getting on with their lives. They've not made much impact on the lands around, that's for sure. Indeed these may well be proper subterranean Orcs - they don't have any direct access to the surface, so they're more likely to be focussed on what is going on around them in the dungeon than the usual thing I do with Orcs, which is use some caverns as a base for attacking the wider area. Maybe they just don't care about the surface.

So what do Orcs do when they're not attacking human settlements? I need to give the workings of a proper 'Orcish society' a good hard think. I mean, there are 600+ of them. If that was a human settlement, I'd be thinking hard about water-supplies and taverns and bakers and craftspeople and where all the food was coming from and where the shit was going. It's a bit bigger than a village - 160 'families' is a small town. They're also somewhat out of their Level 1-2 comfort zone. They're surrounded by nasty nasties. OK, there are hordes of them, but even so...

So now, in amongst my 'lair building' (on the basis that a 'lair' averages 2 rooms - yeah, right) I also have to find room for a small town of 640 or so Orcs.

I love dungeon-building.

Darksouls - a new look at a Basic D&D monster

Darksouls are beings from the Plane of Horror, who have come to this world to feed on the life-energy here.

Darksouls are the hungry souls of those who have done great evil, given a new horrific existence by their dread and unknown masters. 

Darksouls are pieces of the Shadow-plane ripped from its bearings and stranded in our world.

Darksouls are the images of evil left behind when one turns away from a mirror.

Darksouls are the extremities of a single vast, blind and mindless parasite that lives below the plane of our world, merely the feeding tubes it sends into the world of life and energy we know.

Just as sunlight can be trapped in rocks and plants to leak out in the dark, so Darkness itself can be trapped to take the form of Darksouls, even in the light.

No-one knows what Darksouls are. They just know what they do. They feed, they feed off the life-force of people who go into the Dark.

They look like shadows. But they're shadows cast by no visible light, without a body to be the source of the shadow.

Sometimes, when they're attacking, they look a little like people. They seem to have limbs and a head atop a vague swirling body-shape as if of a robed cowled figure.

Is that because people understand them as people-shaped?

Or is it because the Darksouls themselves will mimic their prey?

What do the shadows look like to dogs or mules or giant spiders? Do they appear to be humanoid? Or does the Darksoul project an image back into the mind of the being it is hunting?

Are Darksouls actually intelligent at all? Or are they merely drawn to living flesh as water is drawn to flow downhill, blindly hunting for the life-force they dimly sense?

No-one knows. No-one has ever interrogated a living Darksoul, no-one has ever examined a dead Darksoul, no-one has ever captured a Darksoul. They have killed Darksouls, or been killed by them, or fled very far away. Darksouls cannot be reasoned or bargained with, they cannot be distracted or amazed, they cannot be confused. They are as implacable as Winter or Age or Gravity. They can only be fought or outrun.

 =====================================================

In D&D, Shadows are not undead. They are creatures made of Darkness. Their origin is mysterious and they are - or should be - terrifying. Many years ago, in 'tidying up' D&D (cutting a lot of extraneous and 'silly' monsters, generally being quite 'logical' about it all), I decided that Shadows were Undead - somewhere around Wights, I think, on the Turning Table. Years later, I found out that AD&D had done the same.

Obviously I was wrong. Shadows are not just the souls of evil people or those who have died in torment or the result of a particular necromantic spell. They are Manifest Darkness itself.

And I've randomly generated a lot of them on Level 3 of my megadungeon. I think there will be some sort of portal there. Not too - that would be too horrifically deadly - but at the very least from. A wound in the fabric of reality through which the Darksouls seep from the Plane of Horror, always and forever seeking to feed.

That'll be nice for a party, eh?

Silvergate Megadungeon creation rumbles on

Two weeks or so into the process and I'm progressing nicely with the creation of Silvergate, abandoned capital of the Dwarves. The Dwarven name for this city is Zaborhegaznazun, or 'out-coming-place of metal of the moon', and not, as humans seem to think, Baraghegaznazun or 'doors of metal of the moon'. In Dwarvish, 'Silver-doors' is really not the same as 'Silvergate'. Obviously, the Dwarves first came here as miners, for the moon-metal. They stayed and built an enormous city.

I have developed a methodology for fairly quickly filling the levels. Each level will have some rooms that I'm determined to fit in - set-piece rooms, really. I 'know' I want a large Bugbear lair on Level 3; I know I want a vast throne room on Level 5. But much of the levels will be 'randomly' stocked (but even so, having randomly-generated a lot of Bugbears for Level 3, that's fine, I'm just clustering a lot of them together).

First, I'm breaking each level up into sections and sub-levels, each with 4-8 lairs in it. I count an average of 1 lair = 2 rooms. Not all lairs are 2 rooms - some are more, some are only one room. But it's good enough as a rough average. So sections and sub-levels will generally include between 8-16 occupied rooms (roughly, not including the places where wandering monsters might turn up, and maybe with a few extra-special rooms thrown in). At my standard rough-and-ready calculation of 1/3 of rooms with monsters, that should give me about 25-50 rooms per section or sub-level. More or less.

To find the monsters for these randomly assigned rooms, I'm starting with the wandering monster lists. For each random lair, I'm rolling a d6 and if it's a 1, then that it is the lair of large number of creatures from the Wandering Monster list for the level above, and if it's a 6, it's a small number of creatures from the level below's list. On a 2-5, I roll on the Wandering Monster list for that level. I have extended the principle with Level 1, if I roll a 6 for a Level 2 monster, I then repeat the roll and if it's another 6 I consult the tables for Level 3 and cut numbers even further. No reason that a single Ogre can't lair on Level 1 - just not 8 of them, that really wouldn't be at all good for the party's survivability. I'm pretty sure I've finished Level 2 but I haven't quite finished Level 3 - I will be continuing the idea with deeper dungeon beasties as I go down.

In sub-level 2a ('The Guardrooms', with 45 rooms), there are 6 random lairs, with Hobgoblins, Berserkers, Giant Black Widows, Robber Flies and Rock Baboons (two lairs of these, Rock Baboons featured strongly in the random rolls for Level 2). That gives me 12 out of 15 rooms occupied by my random monsters. The other 3 rooms I'm assigning to specific creatures and features I want to see. The humanoid groups both control 'suites' as a territory rather than single rooms while the Spiders, Robber Flies and Baboons might patrol a territory (several of them are on my Wandering Monster tables - these are specific to each sub-level or section) but they use single rooms as home bases.

Once I've got a creature, I roll another d6. This is to determine if a creature is lairing, is a wanderer, or if it's both. 1,2, it's wandering, 3,4 it's both lairing and wandering, and 5,6 it's just lairing. It could be that all the first 5 creature-rolls produce wanderers and lairs, but it hasn't happened yet. If they do (I'm only having 5 wanderers per section) the 6th won't. If 6 random lairs don't produce 5 wanderers, I'll roll again on the table until I have my 5 Wandering Monsters. When I roll a wanderer that's the same as a lair (either because the lair has wanderers, or because I randomly rolled a Hobgoblin lair, which doesn't have wanderers, but then, in rolling for wanderers, I get a Hobgoblin result again) the wanderers always count as 'extra'. So the number of Hobgoblins in theory in that section or sub-level could be greater than the maximum number of a Hobgoblin lair. Doesn't matter, it's all gravy.

Other sections on Level 2 feature more Berserkers, Robber Flies and Rock Baboons (I must use the Rock Baboons in the approaches to Silvergate too, it's sort of beginning to resemble Gibraltar in my head, a great fortified rocky outcrop covered in screeching primates). The Berserkers are local barbarians who are battling Hobgoblins for the upper levels, but neither the Berserkers nor the Hobgoblins are particularly unified. In fact, with 3 or 4 different Berserker groups across Levels 1 & 2, I'm considering giving each Berserker lair a distinguishing feature (perhaps utilising this table from The Dungeon Dozen to chose Barbarian styles) and making them hostile to each other (though not necessarily the party). If the party wants to go around enlisting barbarian-berserker allies, or doing something as 'silly' (not silly) as getting themselves adopted into the tribe so they have a 'safe base' to retreat to, they might have to put up with the negative consequences from other groups. Like when 'The Warriors' have to cross New York City to get home through an environment where their gang's jackets are going to get them into trouble.

There is another area - an old necropolis that the party can find out about before they go in if they want to do some research - that is mostly composed of Ghoul and Zombie lairs. I did this on purpose as I knew I wanted this necropolis to be there. I just put all the random undead results that I generated in one section, and made sure that there are some rumours that indicate that there are undead in the upper levels. Research about the complex should turn up these rumours and then the party can begin to prepare themselves. I'm very much in favour of the party doing some forward planning - this place was 1,000 years being built and used (or more) and has been abandoned for 400 years. Plenty of information (not all of it recent or necessarily accurate, for sure) should be available if the party ask around either with adventurers or Dwarves (or both), consult libraries and sages, etc. I see no reason to change the stats of Dwarf-Zombies or Dwarf-Ghouls, just because they're shorter. Not so many humanoids in this area, but some giant animals of varying kinds all the same.

The hard parts of this process are deciding what sections there should be; justifying the large numbers of Sprites/Pixies/Halflings that come up in a random megadungeon; and knowing when to stop.

I can decide on some sections (such as the Guardrooms for 2a, and the Necropolis on Level 2) but my creativity may start to flag when I have done 60 of them. I'm going to use some random map generations for these areas, probably using some of the generators from The Dungeoneering Dad's 'sweet arse random dungeon generators' which look very handy, and might suggest some themes to me; and maybe I'll use some random name generations for different sections as well, perhaps from the Seventh Sanctum Adventure Site Generator. I've just tried it out and among less-suitable names, it's produced Abyss of Monsters; Bloodstained Labyrinth of the Cannibal King; Grotto of the Sorcerer; Metal Dungeon; Profane Catacombs. Not sure what makes catacombs 'profane', but there's a certain amount there to be going on with.

As for the Sprites etc, there are a lot of potentially friendly lairs in the upper levels. Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, Barbarians... but perhaps this is necessary, it's not really convenient for the party to pop back to the nearest village to restock and recover. They will need some safe bolt-holes. I'm confident that they'll be less comfortable past Level 3 and wishing for a corner inhabited by more-or-less-friendly Gnomes.

It's so easy to produce results however that I think I've probably overstocked the dungeon. Which means I could create even more of it, if only I could produce that many maps... hence the random generators of course.

If I were doing all this out of my brain and not using the tables, I probably wouldn't put in as many giant insects (I know spiders aren't insects), baboons or berserkers. My default setting is 'add more Orcs'. There would be thousands of them. My abandoned Dwarf city would be like Moria, with a couple of bits of the Paths of the Dead. So far, having fleshed out a goodly chunk of Levels 1-3 (with just over 100 lairs and more than 500 rooms accounted for I think... I'm close to finishing the monsters for Levels 1-3), I think there are about 30 Orcs in total. Which is fine. In my gameworld, Orcs aren't particularly associated with this overground region, so why put Orcs in the tunnels of an abandoned Dwarf city? It wasn't attacked by Orcs, it was abandoned after a war between Dwarves and Humans, and subsequent Dwarven civil war. It was partially sacked by vengeful Humans, and colonised by squatters.

Obviously, given the dice rolls, those squatters included Rock Baboons and Giant Spiders, which seems reasonable enough. The Barbarians - sorry, Berserkers - are there because their tribes send warriors in to a) test their hardihood (I was going to put 'manhood' but these are equal-ops barbarian tribes) and b) to smack anything too vicious before it becomes a threat to outside. The mountain range where Silvergate is situated borders a region of horse-nomads and other 'barbarian' tribes. They don't want hordes of Gnolls and Bugbears or the odd dragon or two popping over to make a mess of their horseflesh, no thank you. Much better to keep some 'Cave Guards' in the city to watch for monster incursions. Or is that 'excursions'?

Can the PCs exploit the fractional/factional nature of the 'ecology' of the upper levels? Maybe. Getting the Berserkers to unite and wipe out the Hobgoblins might be a bold move. But, it is a sensible one? Are the Hobgoblins (who hold an important staircase/junction point) actually preventing the Bugbears from coming up the stairs? And who from further into the complex are the Bugbears blocking? If the Bugbears move up into Hobgoblin territory, will a horde of Ogres come up and rule Level 3? Perhaps stirring a hornet's nest isn't such a good idea - not at least when the chief hornet is 200 feet long, has a 300 foot wingspan and breathes fire.

Bitten by the Megadungeon bug

It's no good. I think, somehow, it's encoded into the gaming DNA.

I'm about 2 years older than the people I most regularly do 'gaming stuff' with. One result of this is that I was one of those weird hybrid players who started with the Moldvay Basic D&D but the Mentzer Expert. Everyone else I know uses Mentzer Basic. There probably aren't so many differences, but it's a generation thing I think.

Anyway, I regard myself as a bit of a hybrid in terms of gaming style too. Part-megadungeon-basher, part-ecological-dungeon-explorer, I have over the years given fairly free rein to the urge to create wildernesses with lairs in them, with only occasional (unsuccessful) forays into the lost art of the megadungeon.

But, buoyed up by the panoply of discussions about OD&D and the art of the megadungeon (for example, over at Beyond the Black Gate), I've decided anew to give it a go. And, what's more, I've realised I've got a perfect excuse.

Part of what I've been researching recently is an interest in old British gaming. I'm an old British gamer: I have many classic issues of White Dwarf, from before the days they were only going to feature Games Workshop's products. Unfortunately for my plans to use them, so have my gaming buddies, we're all pretty much the same age (unless I end up doing the retro campaign campaign with my son's mates... which is still on the cards).

What my friends don't seem to have is old copies of Imagine. This was the TSR UK magazine produced approximately 1984-87. It featured a campaign setting called 'Pelinore', which included a city called 'The City League' in a county called 'Cerwyn' in a world... well - if you go to Phil Gyford's website, there's a pdf of a huge amount of collected material from the Pelinore setting - and my hand-copied version of the map of The City League (without adventure locations) which is the basis of my new city-campaign is right here:

What isn't included in Phil's pdf is one of the Pelinore-compliant adventures that was published in Imagine, of which I have a copy from around 1985. Now, I didn't have many issues of Imagine and certainly there's much more in Phil's pdf than I ever had - and so, some of it hasn't been incorporated into 'my' version of the City League (shorn of its wider setting, of which I knew little until downloading the pdf). But what I do have gave me one of the fundamental parts of the 'ancient history' of my campaign.

In my campaign world, Dwarves are an exiled race. Big deal; Dwarves are exiled in The Hobbit too. But, in my campaign world, taking a cue from this adventure published in Imagine, the Dwarves are exiles not because a Dragon (or Goblins/Lizard Men, a la Warhammer/Oldhammer) invaded their city, but because the last Dwarf King, Karyl, was corrupted by an evil power (a servant of one of the Gods of the Pelinore setting) into waging war with the human neighbours of his kingdom. I took a decision (because I happened on another bit of information about Dwarves from a different source set 400 years in the past) to make this event 400 years ago in game time (a couple of Dwarven generations). This, in the adventure, is little more than a hook to hang a quest on. In world-building terms, it's gold.

There are more or less two sorts of Dwarves in my campaign world; Dwarves who are ashamed of Karyl's actions, and blame him for the destruction of their home and their banishment, and Dwarves who are resentful of the situation they are now in, and therefore blame the humans, and by default whitewash Karyl and his actions. The former tend to seek redemption for themselves and their race by becoming crusaders and monster-hunters; the latter tend to be grumpy blacksmiths and tavern-keepers who spend their time hating their jobs, their clients and burning with rage any time a miserable human looks down on them (pun optional).

Anyway; because there is a 'Last Dwarf King' there is also an 'ex-Dwarf kingdom'. And in the 'ex-Dwarf kingdom', are one or more 'former Dwarf cities'. Now, what could offer a better megadungeon environment than a former Dwarf city? I mean, really, we're talking Moria-like megadungeon potential here, in terms of scope, but because the plot isn't 'city falls to marauding Orcs', there's no necessity for a vast number of one type of monster (as there probably would be were one to actually try to run Moria as a megadungeon, say). Essentially the city was vacant (or was it? Are there still Dwarves inside? Are the shades of the Dwarven dead, or the ghosts of their innocent victims, haunting the depths?) and so it was colonised by squatters. And those squatters can be anything at all...

So, yesterday, instead of doing anything about The City League, which I really should be working on, I sketched out the entrance to Level 1 and the Main Hall of Level 3, and drew a complete map of sub-Level 2a (the Guard Level) of Silvergate, fallen capital of the Dwarf Realm...