To me a mega dungeon is a dungeon that can occupy your parties entire career, that a DM can devote their entire career fleshing out and understanding. ToEE in AD&D and Rappan Athuk in 5e are my jam.
The Big Rubble has remained my favorite idea for a mega-dungeon concept with a twist. I think it meets your requirements for inclusion as such and definitely meets my idea of a mega - dungeon location. The idea is easy to lift from Glorantha to include in any campaign with some ruins from a bygone age. (And if your campaign doesn't include ruins - why not!
I had a DM who used the City-State of the Invincible Overlord as a Forgotten ancient city to be explored by adventurers. Some parts of the city were still occupied and some were in ruins. It was an interesting place to visit..
@@tr349 Nice. I have the Mayfair Games boxed set edition. Leaves a lot to be desired as far as a campaign setting goes but as an add on, hmmm now I have an idea of what to do with it.
Scope: A "mega" dungeon is something that needs to be extensive enough to serve as a primary focus for an entire campaign. Form: Totally agree that it need not be a classic vertical "dungeon" in form. A ruined city, a sprawling castle or palace, a demiplane, a haunted primeval forest, etc. would serve just as well.
I think I'd use "tentpole" rather than "primary focus." That is, it's a place that the PCs can always come to if they want to, but there is plenty of other stuff for them to explore if they so choose. Not that it matters to the definition of megadungeon per se, but I like the thought that there's more to the campaign than just the dungeon.
I know this dungeon is in the Forgotten Realms but I view Undermountain as probably the penultimate mega dungeon. Id like to create a mega dungeon to go along with a massive metropolis city setting. The dungeon could serve as innumerable number of adventures delving in there plus all the things going on in the metropolis.
A very interesting video about an interesting topic. I had written a few paragraphs before I realized that I was rambling and wasn't making as much sense as I meant to, which is never a good sign. 😛 The summation is as follows: some large adventures are megadungeons and some are self-contained sandboxes. Megadungeons are complete as is while SCS need the DM to work on them to keep them going. For example, X1- Isle of Dread, B4 - The Lost City, and I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City are not really megadungeons, though they are encapsulated adventure spaces like megadungeons, but they need the DM to expand them to make them places for adventurers to adventure for multiple levels and where players wish to keep exploring for real life weeks or months.
Great video ty. I liked Bandit’s Keep’s distinction between faction-based mega-dungeons and more “Gygax”-weird style. I’m trying both in my current build, see what my players prefer. Thank you for the content and hard work!
Mega-Dungeons & Hex-Crawls, should have encounters that run from 1st to 20th or beyond. they are also expeditionary stylistic games that should include rules that are overlooked by standard heroic play, such as encumbrance tagalongs & hirelings, good turn base exploring rules etc.
I agree with the notion that a good mega-dungeon (which I agree with the host that this can be a conventional dungeon or wilderness area, say) should have encounters for all levels. It becomes a fixture in a campaign that the characters, or generations of characters, return to different areas of.
For what I understand, a megadungeon is less a place, and more a setting. It's the equivalent of a nation or even world, with multiple factions, cultures and a self sufficient economy. It live its life when the adventurers are not there, cleared rooms get new occupants, the same way a unoccupied valley will see settlers coming. The Dungeon Meshi manga, for example, present this dungeon based economy/ecosystem : the dungeon(s) continue to exist beyond the adventurers. It is never "cleared". You just visit it in some place or an other and leave (hopefully)
YES this is hot property on my shelf, with 'The World's Largest Dungeon' from Alderac the queen of the ball. I did play Ptolus, which found it comparable in it's lovely 'Spire'. The Largest Dungeon is beatable if your players will dedicate four years.
Well, Joe, you expected and asked for disagreement, so I will not let you down! Your stipulation that a mega-dungeon is unclearable seems too restrictive. In principle, some obscenely powerful PCs could take out even Zagyg, Halaster, or Orcus, and thus be on their way to clearing the Greyhawk Dungeon, Undermountain, or Rappan Athuk. I’ll say it just has to be hard to do. The Temple of EE is at the small end of a mega-dungeon, and has a (relatively) easier “victory condition.” I am a bit reluctant to let go of the notion of there being levels, generally of increasing difficulty, to have a mega-dungeon. Off the cuff, I’d say a mega-dungeon merely needs to be big enough that it alone could sustain an entire D&D campaign: thus large enough to take multiple parties of PCs making forays, able to restock losses to some extent, deep enough to challenge PCs of varying levels, from first-level play through “name level.” Again, this def’n would make T1-4 a borderline case, but as it leaves PCs at around 8th level if they ever clear it (defeating Zuggy and destroying the Nodes), that seems about right.
What even were the TSR-published megadungeons in the 70’s and 80’s? Temple of Elemental Evil… then what? I realize that megadungeons were important for the people who designed AD&D, but I don't think they were very important for AD&D as most people experienced it back in the day. Were there a lot of Dragon articles back in the day talking about megadungeons? There were some legitimate megadungeons from third party publishers (JG for example) but TSR publications don't deal with them much. TSR did a lot, lot more with megadungeons during 2nd Edition than they ever did prior to that. I am pretty sure the contemporary interest in megadungeons is an anachronism invented by the OSR movement (which is an extremely anachronistic movement to begin with). Anyway, interesting discussion.
I wouldn't even include ToEE as a megadungeon. And that's the irony - the rules were telling us how to play using a megadungeon concept, but the only way to know what that was, was to play with someone who already had one (or comb through articles in places like Alarums and Excursions, but even those weren't true models to folllow). There were no published examples from TSR, and even the ones from other publishers (like First Fantasy Campaign by JG) weren't really that helpful.
@@GreyhawkGrognard I quite like megadungeons, I don't mean to slag on them of course. Looking to run CotMA sometime soon as well. They make a lot of sense for someone in Gygax's position (dozens of players showing up randomly on different days and little time to create separate adventures for each session). Unfortunately, some modern megadungeons (Arden Vul comes to mind) have impossibly high expectations for session prep in practice, regardless of how interesting they seem to be in theory. TSR adventures were "short and sweet" with their room descriptions and faction dynamics, which made them so much easier to run on the fly.
Nuts. Lots of megadungeons can be cleared, or finished, or whatever term you want to use, including Castle Greyhawk. Kill/imprison/banish Zagyg or restore him to sanity and that dungeon will decay and fall apart over time, especially if you've gotten rid of his maintenance staff in the process. 13th Age's megadungeon the Stone Thief is a living creature and finding and destroying its heart will kill it like any of the lesser living dungeons in the setting - it's just much harder to accomplish thanks to the scale and power levels involved. Any megadungeon with a lynchpin element that keeps it operating is "beatable" in theory, at least.
I have to agree with rich mcgee, - I get what Greyhawk Grognard is saying about infinite boundaries and un-clearable , - Perhaps on the low end of Mega-Dungeons are those that can be beaten and not just endured. Interestingly for a Publishable and Published megadungeon that can be sold to the public i consider The Temple of Elemental Evil just barely qualifies as one.
Unless, of course, the Castle is Zagyg's "One Ring." As long as it exists, so does he, and as long as he exists, so does it. The one will forever create the other. His prison, and his aegis. Sounds like the type of sorcery practiced by an incurable "Mad Archmage" to me. But in your campaign, you may do as you like. That's the glory of D&D.
I use mega-dungeons as a tentpole per region. Others have been there, but direct knowledge of all the inner workings are non-existent. Shady dealers sell maps if the location that may, or may not be fake. Groups team up and go after, specific items and clear different sections. But sealing them up, or destroying them completely is usually impossible. Clearing them out; should be a temporary measure, nature abhors a vacuum and fantasy worlds even more so.
