
Big McStrongmuscle |
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I can't speak for either of those modules, but I do know a lot about running megadungeons. A few major pieces of advice for changing big dungeons from dull slogs to fun sandboxes:
1) This might not come up for you, since you aren't drawing your own map, but DO NOT block major corridors with puzzles, strong monster lairs, traps, or locked doors. Sandboxes are about interesting choices. If you put obstacles on a major corridor, it ceases to be a major corridor. Part of the megadungeon experience is the players getting to decide how deep they want to risk going. I don't know how those two modules handle it, but published adventures constantly make this mistake, and it's largely responsible for the bad reputation of dungeon crawls as grinding slogs. By all means use obstacles to seal away interesting side paths, shortcuts, and optional areas, but *never* the main path to the more dangerous regions. On a similar note, be sure to place keys to most locked or magical doors so that the people who aren't wizards or thieves can actually go through them.
2) Your PCs don't have to know all the details of the different areas on the way to where they are going. They *do* need to know which area to search. They also need to be able to tell when they've reached a different area of the dungeon. Long stairs down, thousand-foot-long passages, gigantic sealed doors, major changes in architecture, trailsigns, magic runes, directional signs, graffiti, half-dead or all-dead NPCs, journals, half-assed map fragments, and magic mouths are also all fine and very traditional ways to make the point. It helps a lot if you give each area a name. They also need to be able to make at least a decent guess that the new area is harder or easier than the one they just left. Traditionally, dungeons get harder as you go deeper down or further off the beaten path, but that's not necessarily the only system that works. The PCs must have enough information at any major crossroads to at least make the choice of direction interesting, even if they don't know all the consequences yet. If they want more details than you want to give, don't cave and tell them. Make them cast a divination or beat the information out of a goblin.
3) Reward players that take exploration and divination spells by not shutting them down when they try to use them. Light, detection spells, augury, clairvoyance, knock, create food and water. Let it work. You *want* your players using that stuff. Survival spells help let the party reach further into the really fun areas, and divinations are a great way to feed the party exposition they wouldn't otherwise get.
4) You need some form of time pressure and dwindling resources to stop your players from just resting all the time and get them playing the should-we-forge-ahead-or-slow-down game. Tracking light and food is optional, but useful at low levels. You should use wandering monsters, because unlike supplies, they stay useful for time pressure after the casters get "Create Food and Water". Make encounter checks every time the party takes a long time about anything, makes a loud noise, or (gods forbid) sleeps in the dungeon. If for whatever reason (guy on watch, rope trick, locked saferoom) the monster knows they are there, but can't attack them immediately, have it try to stalk them just out of sight until the first time someone isolates themselves or looks vulnerable.
5) Megadungeons are about claustrophobia, sprawl, endurance, and the stress of attrition, not usually about focused firepower. This depends a bit on the party, but 60-75% of your wandering monsters should be no more than EL+0: just tough enough to bruise the PCs and make them waste a spell or two in a quick fight. You want to have a rare few out-of-depth monsters (maybe 5-15% at EL+3 or more) around most areas that are so terrifying the players *should* escape, and that are either slow enough or stupid enough that players *can* escape. Variable-level monsters help keep "run, fight, sneak, or talk" an interesting choice. Make sure the players can learn ahead of time about about the scariest wandering monster in each area via rumors, NPCs, tracks, dung, giant piles of burned corpses, etc. Monsters in their lairs can potentially be tougher than wandering ones (EL+0 to EL+2), but should be much more rewarding to fight.
6) DON'T use damage traps to cause attrition. Constant use of boring damage traps on hallways and chests give you paranoid PCs who spend years cautiously searching every inch of dungeon and then don't get anywhere. Traps work much better and slow down the game much less when they are protecting side rooms instead of main hallways; when you us one long-term status effect trap instead of a whole bunch of damage traps (poison works well); when they cause exploration problems instead of straight attacks (like sealing passages, turning out the lights, or setting the complex on fire); and when they are used by intelligent creatures to harry intruders and buy time to scramble a defense. They work especially well as a dare for bold PCs. Make the trap itself blatantly obvious, but use it to guard a valuable treasure, an unexplored passage, a big red button, or some other visible bait so tempting that the PCs might risk it anyway.
7) Most monsters shouldn't just kill victims. Figure out what each monster *wants* for the party. Goblins might interrogate prisoners and take slaves, which makes for good future missions, and even a cave bear can drag unconscious characters back to the den to eat at leisure. That gives the other PCs a brief chance to plan a rescue op, or the injured character a chance to escape. Consider letting people play alternate characters or hirelings if their main PC is unavailable.
8) This is important. Award XP for achieving goals, but NOT every time they kill a monster. Give the XP for loot, explored areas, cleared lairs, quest completion, new monster types encountered, whatever you want. The specifics don't matter that much. But you should NEVER EVER EVER let killing wandering monsters be worth the party's trouble. Wandering monsters are there as a disincentive for wasting time and a way to wear down player resources. If you make them profitable, it defeats the entire purpose of deterrence and encourages the party to just fight them as they come for the XP. Save the rewards for lairs, secret treasures, deathtraps, and the like. The only real exception I can think of is if the party is specifically *trying* to lure monsters out of their lair and kill them.
Hopefully some of that is useful to you!