The Monster Man Returns!

Megadungeon Level 1 - Lessons Learned

So now you've seen it, hopefully had a chance to really look it over.  A few of you have even given some feedback. (Thank you!)  I'm already well on my way to getting the second level done, and I'm running into some themes.

Gems and even jewelry seem to be way more common than I expected them to be.  This leads me to think that somewhere deep down in the dungeon there is a mine, or maybe even multiple mines where all these gems are coming from.

Magic seems to be pretty rare, at least in forms that are generally usable to an adventurer.  I'm averaging 1 magic treasure per map (a few have multiple items).  On the other hand, the magic that they find will be pretty powerful (the +3 warhammer that you've already seen for example).  One thing that I'm considering along those lines is that there are several spell casters and chieftains in the second level who may have their own items.  At the very least the arcane spell casters will have spell books, though rarely will a monster's spell book look like a human or elven spell book.

In response to some of the comments:

The first level ended up being a single page... I'm not sure why.  As I was drawing it, it just seemed to wrap itself up that way.  The second level, by comparison, is currently at 5 pages.  I'm counting the area past the giant rift as a lower level... Anyway, since the first level ended up being only a single page I kinda figure it'll be a bit of a bottleneck, keeping the baddies down below.  Plus it seems like it's just enough to get the players ready for the larger 2nd level.

Secret doors... yeah, adding more of them would probably be a good idea, otherwise they'll give up looking for them.

The friendly/neutral NPCs in this level are going to be the kobolds.  They're under assault from the ghouls and the wererats for control of the level, and happy for any assistance.  In looking things over I realize I didn't make that at all clear.  I'll have to revise this to make it more clear.  I do have some ideas for NPCs on the second level... but that's for later.

Large rooms.  I have never been particularly attached to large rooms, in part because I never know what to put in them.  I'll think about it though.  What do you put in your big rooms?

Megadungeon thoughts?

On Friday I posted the... well, probably not final draft, but a working draft of the first section of my megadungeon. 

CLick here to go to the post.

Anyone have any thoughts? 

Thanks!

The power of imagination

I found this picture, and thought I would share, because isn't this really what it's all about?

I hope you all have a great weekend!

Megadungeon Level 1 Complete!

You dealt with the wandering monsters, heard the philosophy, looked upon the treasure, and found the monsters lairs.  Now it's time to put it all together.  In my last post you saw basically where everything goes, but there were still gaps.  What were the traps and special things?  Where would the treasure be found?  Where do those stairs go?

Lets start with the traps.  Rooms 6, 9, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 24, and 32 have traps.  I'm going to try to avoid duplicating traps in any section of the dungeon.  I decided to start with a fun magical trap that always makes me smile when they use it in Order of the Stick: Explosive Runes.  Now there isn't any reason it has to do as much damage as it does in 3e, so this is a lesser version doing 1d6 points of damage.  I stuck that in a moldy library.

A spear trap is another common trap, and perfectly suitable for my dungeon.  I'll stick one of those in there. Pit traps are also synonymous with dungeons.   

Not all traps are deadly, or even harmful.  Some merely misdirect.  An illusionary wall will make a hallway look like a closet.

A sleeping gas trap at the top of the stairs could lead to some very memorable results.  So can greased stairs.

Traps can also... well... trap those that set it off.  A dropping portcullis turns a room into a cage.

How about a poison water fountain?  The poison can be neutralized by silver!  

Now for the special items.  These are always more difficult for me, because they are supposed to be special.  I try to be at least a little original in the things that I give to my players to interact with.  Rooms 26, 31, and 35 are my special rooms.  Now I'm going to try 3 different specials: a weird, a helpful, and one that will directly interact with the players and may be harmful or helpful.  A rain forest fungus room, a stuck door which will grant a strength bonus if opened, and a green devil face that likes to talk and eat gems. 

I think that covers just about everything.  To see it all together you can download the first level of the megadungeon by clicking the link below. 

Download the Megadungeon Level 1 here (if you have a Google account)!  Or here you don't (mediafire)!

I hope you've enjoyed seeing it all come together, and if you have any comments and/or suggestions please let me know.

Stocking the Megadungeon - 1st level - monsters

This is the third in my series about stocking the first level of my megadungeon.  This post deals with the monsters of the first level and the placement of the monsters in the dungeon itself.  As I said before I decided to use my wandering monster chart to help determine who actually lives in my dungeon.  For reference, here is the level 1 wandering monster chart.


Level 1   
1    Bandit    1d6
2    Beetle, Fire    1d6
3    Centipede, Giant    1d6
4    Centipede, Giant    1d6
5    Darkmantle    1
6    Ghoul    1
7    Goblin    1d6
8    Green Slime    1
9    Gremlin    1d8
10    Kobold    2d6
11    Kobold    2d6
12    Lemure (devil)    1
13    NPC Party    1
14    Rats, Giant    1d3
15    Skeleton    1d10
16    Spider, Crab    1d2
17    Stirge    1d8
18    Wererat    1d2
19    Zombie    1d3
20    Zombie    1d3

Like I said last post, when I rolled a monster on the room contents chart I rolled on this chart to see what monster it would be.  It ended up like this:

Crab spider x4
Darkmantle
Fire beetle x7
Ghouls x6
Green slime
Green slime
Gremlin
Kobolds x11
Lemure
Skeleton x6
Skeleton x8
Stirge x1
Stirge x4
Stirge x8
Wererat x2
Wererat x6

I also rolled 6 Traps, 3 traps with treasure, 4 unguarded treasures, and 4 special results.  What to make of this?  The stirges work best when they have access to the outdoors, so they'll go close to the entrance.  The spiders, beetles, darkmantle, and green slimes can all be used anywhere in the dungeon as they're all unintelligent creatures/pests/vermin.  The gremlin and the lemure are wildcards, weird things that can really mess with a party.  That leaves me with the intelligent creatures - the ghouls, kobolds, and wererats.  As an interesting note, the ghouls have a warhammer +3, the first and only magic item in the level! 

Obviously the skeletons will hang out with the ghouls in their own corner of the dungeon.  The wererats and the kobolds are both sneaky, and both probably afraid of the ghouls, which helps explain the traps.  Aside from that I'm guessing that the kobolds and the wererats have come to an uneasy peace, with the kobolds highly on the defensive, lacking the ability to seriously hurt the wererats.  I'm thinking that the vast majority of the kobold traps will involve fire or acid because of that, and that all of the traps with treasure were set by the kobolds to try to lure the wererats to their death.    

Now that I have all that figured out, it's time to fill in the dungeon itself.  Sorry for the formatting, but as you can see the first column is the room, the second was the roll it was associated with, and the last one is the room contents.  You can see the map here. 

 Room      Roll      Contents
 1      25      stirge x1
 2      5      Skeletons x6
 3      24      green slime 8,000cp, 3,000sp, 500gp, 4 gems
 4      30      Ghoul x6 1,000cp, 4,000sp, warhammer +3
 5      28      skeletons x8
 6      6      Trap
 7      9      Lemure
 8      10      empty
 9      11      trap
 10      41      wererat x2 8,000cp, 4 gems
 11      14      Wererat x6 2,000sp
 12      12      trap
 13      22      Trap
 14      16      empty
 15      15      treasure & trap 100sp, 20gp
 16      18      empty
 17      20      fire beetle x7
 18      23      treasure & trap 200sp
 19      19      empty
 20      36      trap
 21      7      Kobolds x11 4,000cp
 22      37      stirge x4
 23      34      treasure 400sp, 40gp
 24      26      trap
 25      27      stirge x8 4 gems
 26      2      Special
 27      8      empty
 28      17      crab spider x4 
 29      4      empty
 30      21      green slime 1,000sp, 1,000gp, 6 gems
 31      35      Special
 32      38      treasure 200sp, 5 gems
 33      44      gremlin x1 
 34      43      empty
 35      29      special
 36      13      Darkmantle - 100sp, 50gp
 Not used      40      Treasure 600sp, 40gp
 Not used      1      Treasure 300sp, 10gp
 Not used      3      Treasure 200sp, 60gp, 3 gems
 Not used      32      Treasure & Trap 100sp, 50gp
 Not used      31      special
 Not used      33      empty
 Not used      39      empty
 Not used      42      empty

As you can see, I opted not to use 3 of the unguarded treasures, one of the specials, and one treasure trap combo. 

I am a little worried about my results, as the wererats are invulnerable to normal weapons, and ghouls are very deadly.  If they aren't careful it could easily end in a TPK. 

There's still some more work to do on the dungeon, check back tomorrow to read about traps, special rooms, and to see the "finished" PDF!

Stocking the Megadungeon - 1st level treasure

This is the second post detailing how I stocked the first level of my dungeon. The first post detailed my philosophy. This post deals with rolling up the rooms and their treasure. The third post will deal with the monsters and assigning them in the various rooms.

I decided to use my wandering monster charts to stock the monster of the dungeon, figuring that if they're wandering around, then they probably live there. To determine what was actually in a room I used the dungeon stocking chart from the Rules Cyclopedia. I made a total of 44 rolls before I remembered that my first level only has 36 rooms. If the roll indicated a monster, I rolled on my wandering monster chart. Had I rolled an NPC Party I had planned to roll on the level 2 chart, but it never came up.

When I initially rolled it I just rolled to see what was in the room generally. Does it have a monster? Treasure? A trap? And I noted that down on my paper. Then I went and rolled the treasures that weren't attached to the monsters. Then I rolled the monsters, and their treasurers. Finally I started looking at the totals, and I realized that I had rolled 32 gems for the level. That's 32 individual gems that I need to roll for.

So I did, using the chart from page 226 of the RC.

The first column is the gem number, the second the percentile roll, and the last column the gp value per the Rules Cyclopedia.

 1      1      10
 2      1      10
 3      1      10
 4      5      50
 5      5      50
 6      11      100
 7      15      100
 8      19      100
 9      25      100
 10      26      500
 11      26      500
 12      37      500
 13      38      500
 14      39      500
 15      43      500
 16      44      500
 17      47      1,000
 18      52      1,000
 19      54      1,000
 20      58      1,000
 21      58      1,000
 22      58      1,000
 23      60      1,000
 24      69      1,000
 25      70      1,000
 26      72      5,000
 27      74      5,000
 28      81      5,000
 29      81      5,000
 30      82      5,000
 31      82      5,000
 32      83      5,000

For those of you keeping track at home that's 48,030gp worth of gems.


Clearly that is WAY too much wealth for a level 1 dungeon. What's a DM to do? There were a couple of options. I could just drop the gems, or I could adjust their value or their placement. I decuided that I liked the idea of lots of gems, and so I opted to adjust the gem values! This is the same chart as above, but an additional column has been added showing the adjusted values.

 1      1      10      10
 2      1      10      10
 3      1      10      10
 4      5      50      50
 5      5      50      50
 6      11      100      50
 7      15      100      50
 8      19      100      50
 9      25      100      50
 10      26      500      100
 11      26      500      100
 12      37      500      100
 13      38      500      100
 14      39      500      100
 15      43      500      100
 16      44      500      100
 17      47      1,000      250
 18      52      1,000      250
 19      54      1,000      250
 20      58      1,000      250
 21      58      1,000      250
 22      58      1,000      250
 23      60      1,000      250
 24      69      1,000      250
 25      70      1,000      250
 26      72      5,000      500
 27      74      5,000      500
 28      81      5,000      500
 29      81      5,000      500
 30      82      5,000    
 31      82      5,000    
 32      83      5,000

Now since I'm not using all 44 of the rooms I rolled, and one of the rooms I'm not using had 3 gems, I can lop 3 gems off the bottom of the list! Then I just hacked at the values till they resembled what I was looking for. This total comes to 5,280gp, which is significantly more reasonable.


Has anyone else run into situations like this? How did you handle it? If you haven't, how would you in the future?